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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#711

Post by noosphr »

Spivak wrote: post #667
giancarlostoro wrote: post #646

I wish I could just buy out Mozilla outright so that they could you know, focus on building a browser. Alas, my wallets nowhere near big enough to do so. Leave all the business ventures to a completely different (named too) org. I grow tired of them starting something great and then stopping because they've wasted funds. Like oxidizing Firefox I was really excited for. Sadly they stopped while they had broken amazing…

You would buy them out so they could focus 100% of their time to an endeavor that doesn't bring in any money except from a ludicrously generous gift from Google that might be illegal? Like I get it, I wish they could just be a browser company too but all their other side ventures are desperate attempts to diversify their revenue. They don't have a billion dollar ad business obviate their need to actually be a busines…

A charity focusing on their mission instead of making money? Inconceivable!

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#712

Post by alwillis »

KingMob wrote: post #621
alwillis wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When it's gone, there will basically be only one left. Safari's iOS/iPadOS global marketshare is about 33%; it's on 2+ billion devices. Definitely not going anywhere [1]. [1]: https://mycodelesswebsite.com/safari-statistics/

> Definitely not going anywhere Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps. They have every interest in getting that App Store cut, and none in extending the web with open, competing technologies. (* Maybe the recent app store legal rulings ill change things, we'll see.)

> Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps.

Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?

There's no evidence of WebKit languishing. If anything, the WebKit team has shipped important web platform features more quickly than it ever has before.

WebKit is arguably the most important framework for the App Store; many thousands of apps rely on it, including many of Apple's first party apps.

* first to ship in Safari 17, September 2023

* first to ship :has in Safari 15.4, March 2022 [1]

* first to ship wide gamut color support [2]

* the only browser shipping support for JPEG XL

* so many new features shipped in Safari 18.4 it took 8,000 words to describe it all [3]

[1]: https://www.webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...

[3]: https://webkit.org/blog/16574/webkit-features-in-safari-18-4...

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#713

Post by giancarlostoro »

jm4 wrote: post #672
Spivak wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would buy them out so they could focus 100% of their time to an endeavor that doesn't bring in any money except from a ludicrously generous gift from Google that might be illegal? Like I get it, I wish they could just be a browser company too but all their other side ventures are desperate attempts to diversify their revenue. They don't have a billion dollar ad business obviate their need to actually be a busines…

Vivaldi seems to be doing ok and they only focus on a free browser. Brave seems to be doing well too, even if some of what they're doing is controversial. I admire them for at least taking a shot. I don't necessarily fault Mozilla for trying to diversify revenue. The problem is when they neglect the browser to work on silly projects like Pocket, VPN's, mail relay, etc. and not even do a good job on those either. All…

The more I think of who I wish would buy them out based on some of the things they've done for side funding. I think someone like CloudFlare (not Google, Microsoft or Apple) would fit the bill for me. Mozilla birthed Rust, they very likely still have Rust talent onboard. CloudFlare relies on Rust for critical software.

I kind of miss the world the Mozilla was going all in on Rust for Firefox, I think the language could benefit greatly from it, especially in terms of out of the box libraries. One of my hopes was that Rust would eventually build out a standard GUI stack that's cross-platform that would be used by Firefox, but could be used by everyone. Same could be said of all the different pieces that make up Firefox, including the JS engine, could have been its own discrete Rust crate.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#714

Post by alias_neo »

retinaros wrote: post #618
alias_neo wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is something like Apache Solr (a search index) well suited for something like this? I've deployed and used it at work for searching specific, well-specified bits of information, but I don't know how well it would work on large chunks of text like articles etc; I assume this is its real purpose and it should fit, but I'm guessing.

Just pgsql is enough. Even a chache db or sqlite do full text search

I'm not familiar with the various search features of different databases.

Do they offer things like the phonetic search that Solr does?

With Solr you can search a noun for example even if you only know how to say it and not how to spell it.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#716

Post by airbreather »

alwillis wrote: post #523
Lutger wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise. For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When its gone, there will bas…

> For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When it's gone, there will basically be only one left. Safari's iOS/iPadOS global marketshare is about 33%; it's on 2+ billion devices. Definitely not going anywhere [1]. [1]: https://mycodelesswebsite.com/safari-statistics/

what about things like the browser object in Qt/PyQt?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#717

Post by OG_BME »

I recently migrated to Linkwarden [0] from Pocket, and have been happy with the decision.

Linkwarden is open source and self-hostable.

I wrote a python package [1] to ease the migration of Pocket exports to Linkwarden.

[0] https://linkwarden.app/

[1] https://github.com/fmhall/pocket2linkwarden

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#718

Post by MaxBarraclough »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #348
criddell wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think once Apple is forced to allow alternative browsers on the iPhone and iPad, Chrome/Chromium will have won the browser wars. At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.

>At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6. The only lesson Google took from the Microsoft browser monopoly was "make sure the browser doesn't suck ass". So, Chromium will continue to be technically competent, enough that they can lull people to sleep and mine their personal data in ways that should horrify us all. Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising co…

> Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.

True at the time, but spam is now baked into Windows.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/windows-11-has-made-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#719

Post by benjaminoakes »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #564
twilo wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best alt other than perch? For whatever reason I can’t get it to show up in the share/send menu on iOS and doesn’t seem to have a browser extension. How do you send articles to it?

I recently started using wallabag. Seems to do the job decently

I'm glad people are mentioning Wallabag. It's open source and self-hostable, so it's not as likely to disappear on you. If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...

I've run Wallabag before but stopped around the time my son was born so I'd have more time to take care of him. And... I switched to Pocket. Oh well! I guess I'll switch back now, probably for good.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#720

Post by benjaminoakes »

PokerFacowaty wrote: post #595
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'm looking into setting up Wallabag for myself, maybe it could work for you too? https://wallabag.org/

Related bit from my other comment:

> If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...

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