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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

support.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#511

Post by ewoodrich »

apparent wrote: post #488
tristanho wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is definitely one of the biggest painpoints, and we feel it ourselves for whatever it's worth! However, if you're just looking for a replacement for Pocket, you only need the Reader app/extension and it shouldn't be clunky at all. It's only if you want our highlight-specific reviewing/exporting functionality that you would also need the Readwise app... still not ideal, but merging two complex products like this…

The current pricing of Readwise seems like it will not be attractive to the 99% of Pocket users who are just looking for a reader app, and don't want to plunk down $120 every year for that (and various other features they aren't looking for). It looks like you have a "Lite" tier that doesn't include the reader app. Maybe there should be a free tier that offers only the reader app, and you can try to upsell users from…

A lite tier that's only the Reader app would be great. I'm exploring self hosted options to replace Readwise Reader due to the price being a little hard to justify and not using most of the features except the website saving.

BookFusion (cross platform ePub reading app) by comparison has a great pricing structure that makes it hard to ever consider unsubscribing for the value I get. Highly recommend the app for anyone who uses Android eReaders in combo with iOS devices/desktop.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#512

Post by binkHN »

epolanski wrote: post #423
EasyMark wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.

I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.

I agree. To a large extent, the only people you'll see putting Chrome on their iPhones are the people who are cross platform on their laptops.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#513

Post by mbreese »

magicalhippo wrote: post #353
major505 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects. Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live. As someone who grew up on Netscape Navigator, the current situation gives me flashback to how Netscape had to die so Mozilla could be born...

I mean… Phoenix was the original code name for Firefox, so maybe it was just foreshadowing.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#514

Post by sciurus »

thesuitonym wrote: post #384
major505 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects. Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

I'm curious what the governance structure of Mozilla is that keeps things this way. People have been upset for quite a while at the direction Mozilla is going in, yet there seems to be no coalition to oust the current leadership. Is this impossible for some reason?

The leadership has been ousted.

> This includes major growth in our Boards, with 40% new Board members since we began our efforts to evolve and grow back in 2022. We’ve also been bringing in new executive talent, including a new MoFo Executive Director and a Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. By the end of the year, we hope to have new, permanent CEOs for both MoCo and Mozilla.ai... With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#515

Post by whyenot »

tomcam wrote: post #471
whyenot wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.

That makes me very angry. I am fat, wasteful, and directionless but Google pays me nothing.

Is Google your default search engine? If so, you should send them an invoice. :)

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#516

Post by alwillis »

nonillion wrote: post #496
alwillis wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here? Short answer: yes. Here are some web platform features Chrome and Safari (desktop and mobile) are shipping but not Firefox: * Container Style queries: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat... * @scope: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat... * Picture in Picture: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/fea…

I'm not a developer, so maybe I misunderstand what PiP is strictly speaking. But, I thought I had been using PiP for a couple of years now in Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-f... Is this not PiP?

According to caniuse, it's a proprietary implementation that's only partially implemented [1].

[1]: https://caniuse.com/picture-in-picture

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#517

Post by boomboomsubban »

Henchman21 wrote: post #473
boomboomsubban wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.

Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.

It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#518

Post by alfiedotwtf »

whyenot wrote: post #315
major505 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects. Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.

I’ve got job alerts, and it looks like they are going all in on VPN services given how many people they want to hire… yet I don’t know a single person who would use Mozilla’s VPN service let alone pay for it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#519

Post by alfiedotwtf »

doubled112 wrote: post #274
major505 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects. Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

And Thunderbird?

Last time I heard, Thunderbird has zero people on it for years but eventually they manage to afford to pay someone part time to work on it :smh:

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#520

Post by itake »

gorbachev wrote: post #311
podgietaru wrote: post #211

I loved Pocket. I used it nearly daily. I was often in their top n% of users. I paid for it. Then one day they changed the way their rendering worked on iOS. And it destroyed my workflow. I also bought a Kobo E-Reader specifically to use Pocket with it. In short order I found an open-source alternative - Omnivore - and spent my time hacking away at my Kobo to get it to pull from there instead. https://github.com/Podg…

I bought an Amazon Fire tablet exclusively for Pocket use as well. Something did change maybe about year and a half ago about rendering articles. It felt like less and less of them were rendering in article mode, and I needed wifi access to read articles in the original format. Before that practically everything rendered in article mode, afterwards I would say it was about 50%.

yeahs, the offline caching got terrible. its text that (rarely) changes. I have no idea why the mobile app couldn't just remember what each url was, even if it was 6 weeks stale.

Also, Pocket couldn't create reader views for many websites (like hacker news discussions), which means the TTS was useless.

Oh and the TTS required an internet connection.

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