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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#181

Post by niftich »

st3fan wrote: post #167
niftich wrote: post #57

Oh, what a twist! In a story that began two years ago with Pocket's integration by Mozilla [1] in Firefox [2], large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing criticism. This, at first blush, appears unrelated: Mozilla previously announced its Context Graph initiative, which was a bold undertaking to be built partially upon a new and emerging set of W3C standards to take back some of the control over linkage,…

"large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing criticism" Actually .. no. It was a very vocal minority.

You're right, I misspoke; I meant to say several audiences out of a larger pie of distinct cohorts; instead of using wording that implied a large absolute amount of people.

In the past, I've written about [1][2] my views of Mozilla's audiences, and soon after, Mozilla's own internal audiences [3] were brought to my attention. Several of their 'user types' are either noted as averse to change or loss of control.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425956 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161 [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/08/firefox-user-types-in-no...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#182

Post by stinkytaco »

philfrasty wrote: post #21

I have used Pocket for the last five years or so. 99.5% of the articles I bookmark every day I never actually read. Probably should make me think why I use it at all...

I did the same thing. Then I bought a kindle and use calibre to download my reading. That's made all the difference. Much more comfortable to read and I can catch up on an article or two before bed or when I've got a few minutes.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#183

Post by notatoad »

strictnein wrote: post #172
notatoad wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket. I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change . There is an email client that you like, as is, a…

Does the lack of changes include no security updates? Then yes, one should be annoyed and Thunderbird usage should be discontinued.

No, security updates are still being made. Here's the release notes for recent security fixes in thunderbird:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#184

Post by supercoder »

bttf wrote: post #127

I have been working on a prototype for a competitor to Pocket and other save-for-later services with an emphasis on minimalism, privacy and ease of use. https://slushi.es Very early app, features are rolling out daily. My end goal is to build a recommendation engine out of user data, while keeping things anonymous. Although social bookmarking has been done plenty times before, I think execution has been sub-par in pr…

Read it later apps are dead. Why do you think Pocket just got absorbed by Mozilla ?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#185

Post by asymmetric »

st3fan wrote: post #166
Arizhel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there aren't exactly a lot of other great FOSS standalone email applications these days. Everything's been neglected because of webmail, and corporations' dogged insistence on Outlook. So if you think Thunderbird should be killed, what do you suggest as a replacement? It needs to be free, and run on Windows for my company to use it.

Not free, but Postbox is pretty great. It is a continuation of Thunderbird. By former Thunderbird engineers if I am not mistaken. https://www.postbox-inc.com/

Might be pretty great but it's Windows/macOS only, so not sure how much of a continuation of thunderbird it can be considered.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#186

Post by j3097736 »

kibwen wrote: post #101
mbel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(

Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.

Because Google usually does a pretty good job as far as performance is concerned.

ie: They have a simple 404 page instead of some novelty page with funny text and a random webm playing in the background

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#187

Post by jrcii »

To me, Pocket is one of those cluttery icons I need to move off of the toolbar when I setup a new copy of Firefox for someone. If I did want that functionality, which I don't, I'd use an extension called Scrapbook.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#188

Post by diegoprzl »

Arizhel wrote: post #159
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair Thunderbird is awful. Every single time I try to find a better client I see someone suggesting "oh Thunderbird has gotten way better; give it a shot! I love it!" and every time I fall for it and it's the same slow, horrible application that I've tried again and again. I'm all for them killing it.

The problem is that there aren't exactly a lot of other great FOSS standalone email applications these days. Everything's been neglected because of webmail, and corporations' dogged insistence on Outlook. So if you think Thunderbird should be killed, what do you suggest as a replacement? It needs to be free, and run on Windows for my company to use it.

Claws Mail is a good option.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#189

Post by toyg »

kibwen wrote: post #101
mbel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(

Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.

Yes, but we're talking about XUL the platform. That platform was built with the same use-case in mind that Electron has: allowing people to build cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies (html, js etc).

Unfortunately Mozilla failed to execute on that vision, leaving the field open for Electron and friends to emerge. Part of that failure was due to bad technological choices (RDF-XML was terrible), part to the unwieldy Mozilla legacy (the build system was notoriously byzantine) and part to them de-prioritizing anything that Firefox did not need. They had a working general-purpose JS-based UI runtime more than 15 years ago, and still the rise of nodeJS and html-based toolkits passed them by pretty spectacularly - because they had eyes only for Firefox and vanity projects like FFOS.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#190

Post by yuhong »

zobzu wrote: post #66
anexprogrammer wrote: post #48

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me. That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mo…

Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money. That Mozilla is a Corp owned by a not-for-profit isn't the real thing anymore (ie not what people may believe, not that they have any obligation beside following the rule of law) - it just frees the Corp from having to report to random share holders - instead, the Corp and the Org self-select a Board of directors that they report to. At the end of the day, it's othe…

I really wish there was an easier way to do this, ideally something like a corporation with no shareholders.
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