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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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631–640 of 782 posts

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

I did change quite significantly in recent times, so there is certainly work done.

On the other hand it is a mail client and it does exactly what it is supposed to do for years on end. And I believe it is the best mail client too.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Thunderbird is quite healthy and received $8.6M in donations in 2023[0] which is used to employ 24 people[1].

Unlike Firefox, donations are used to fund development.

[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#634
post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Thunderbird is quite healthy and received $8.6M in donations in 2023[0] which is used to employ 24 people[1]. Unlike Firefox, donations are used to fund development. [0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo... [1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

To be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised. Thanks for the info.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug. https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...

On that archived page: "A forever home for your collection" Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.

SaaS rots faster than the bits on your spinning rust. The incentive structure tends to drift away from a corp's long-term strategy. If you don't own it, you don't own it.

Even the bits you own rot faster than brick and mortar. It's just the nature of the universe - cosmic rays, magnetosphere, etc. Doesn't help that the integrated circuits are smaller, and hence much more brittle with each generation.

And do you even own the hardware you purchased? Even before the ongoing craze to turn fridges into subscriptions into landfill. Try some "retro" devices from 15, 20, 30y ago - many builtin websites/apps/services just 404, long before companies planned for obsolescence.

Only diamonds are forever.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#636
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.

Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year. I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?

I used a really low-end system for a while some time back, running Linux, and WebKit-based browsers were the only ones with a mainstream (so: actually renders correctly for practically all sites) engine that was usable with even one tab open (I could do 2-3 as long as none of the pages were “webapps”)

This indicates some kind of fundamentally better design, to me. Probably related to why Safari’s by far the most respectful to battery life, of the big three browsers.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 B…

That doesn't sound like she and her fattened board were ousted at all.

I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.

To help highlight where there are changes and where there is continuity at the top level, here's a table of who was the MoCo CEO, MoCo and MoFo Board Chairs, MoFO President, and MoFo ED over time for the last ten years.

https://imgur.com/a/OLD9EiI

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#639
post #605
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live. Ugh. This sounds so horrible, but this is probably the truest statement on this entire page.

What's even more wild is that many users, even on HN, don't seem to pick up on the fact that the alternatives to Firefox are either Chrome or Chrome in different colored trenchcoats. Firefox is like the last bastion of user choice when it comes to deciding how we interact with the Internet, a choice that has been subtly but steadily stripped from us for years. My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not u…

> why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way chromium is?

Ease of integration. It's impossible to integrate Firefox compared to chromium. Unless this is solved, Firefox will die. The hope is new engines like Servo (maybe ladybird), where they are actually putting time and resources to make it easy to integrate. I'll never switch to chromiumia, but as soon as one of those new engines is mature enough, I'm definitely dropping Firefox.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought as well. I wonder what Kobo will do in response to this announcement.

Me too, I hope there will be a replacement with the same low friction. I've been using IFTTT with RSS feeds to add serialized stories to my Kobo as they release.

Could you share the flow if someone wanted to replicate it for their own Kobo?
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