Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.
Investing in what moves the internet forward | The Mozilla Blog
Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn't the only one doing that.... I'm sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Never even heard of Fakespot, though.
Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I'd get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It's actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.
Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I've had is to ignore any off brand looking product that's been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it's for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
OMG I JUST started using Pocket because my work banned Firefox and made us all switch to Edge!!
Now how am I going to sync bookmarks and pages I want to read later on my personal devices??
If your work doesn't care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
I'd be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn't require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
I forgot what it is called but there is an extension that syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium browsers.
There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone's faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.
Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won't be sad to see it go.
I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not "curating content" or whatever the fuck.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.
well they are terminating it for a reason.
Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It's the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.
Glad it's gone for good.
Bookmarks and services like Pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving links to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while "read later" services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.
"Read once bookmark". Problem solved.
Idk man, my "To watch later" YouTube bookmark folder has a couple of hundred videos in it at this point.
i used to use pocket all the time back in the day. slowly realized there arent many articles worth saving for later let alone reading at all.
I used to use Pocket a lot, it was my main way to read long form articles. I somehow stopped doing that years ago as a way to preserve my mental health. Since then I haven't used Pocket once.
Didn't some articles have the pocket icon, and some were without? I remember trying it a number of years ago and being completely flummoxed by not being able to save things I wanted to read. Though it could have been user error.
bUt iT'S jUSt bOoKmARkS
people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
it's a shame to see it go, it's been the first read-it-later service that I was aware of and used. I've moved away to Omnivore (RIP) and then Wallabag (https://wallabag.it/ for 11€/year, but you can self-host it or find someone else to host it for you for a lower fee), but I've still been thinking fondly of it, despite Mozilla clearly trying to force people into social reading rather than just serve as a convenient offline storage of articles.
edit: this post isn't a request for advice, I'm very happy with my current Wallabag setup.
Why would you need a saas solution if it's for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
Obsidian with the readitlater plugin is good, and actually stored in a standard format entirely on your devices, so truly offline.
I have ended up using Zotero for this, which takes a snapshot of the webpage for offline reading (and preservation). Synced to other clients through my WebDAV server. Originally only used Zotero as a reference manager for academic journal papers, but liked using it more broadly.
people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
I have, and if you need an SaaS for that, I am sorry for you. Pocket was great for getting around paywalls for a while.
I hear you. I discovered Omnivore and was in the process of migrating from Pocket to it until less than a year later Omnivore was gone.
Same. I’ve done pocket and omnivore but now both dead :(
if you happen to be an apple person Safari’s Reading List can save pages offline.
I've heard good things about karakeep (also requires self hosting) https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
Check out LinkedIn for this
I liked Fakespot. Amazon obviously doesn't care whether reviews are legit.
Fakespot has always felt inaccurate to me. Once every 6 months or so I gave it a go to see if any of the updates have improved it but it never felt like it did to me.
Furthermore, I don't see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
I stopped trusting it much when I noticed there's a huge difference between the same product on amazon.ca and amazon.com. On one domain it can give something an F grade while on the other domain it will have an A grade.
It's a nice idea but when you think it about it's actually kind of hard to determine the quality of a particular listing apart from the obvious checks you can do yourself. Like if the seller is some random drop shipper or actually Amazon or the manufacturer.
Judging reviews with whatever AI system they use is not very accurate anyways. Once again the obvious fake reviews can sometimes stand out. But the better ones a machine can't tell any more than you can.
Your 2nd point doesn't make any sense. Sure, you can spend the time returning things. If they're bad and you know they're bad. But what if they're just bad enough?
Take guitar pedals, for example. I know nothing about guitar pedals. I don't know the brands, I don't know the features I should look for, what they should cost, nothing. A company can purchase thousands, tens of thousands, or more fake reviews from a bot farm run by wage slaves. I might buy their subpar pedal based on the good review score. It's fine, it works well enough from my initial testing and doesn't die...
But what I wanted was to purchase one of the better ones, which the false reviews told me it was! I could have spent the same or less for a better product, that rewarded the company that made the superior product. And I might not even know it, at least until it's too late to return. That's (one of) the problems with how bad fake reviews have gotten.
I think it's a good tool. I also think people and companies learned how to circumvent it and avoid being too obvious. And that was before AI! Plus, Firefox (who I didn't even know owned it before today!) doesn't want to invest time/money into it in a perpetual arms race...
I've never known about it until just now, but I wish I had, because my mom definitely needs something like that. Quite a shame
Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.
This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.
I used to use it before it got acquired by Firefox to store my read it later list.
they're focusing on AI instead, it seems
From the 404media article on the subject:
The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers.
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs
T o I h f n e t t e F h r u e n t e u t r e
Serious question. Do people generally use vertical tabs? I work in IT and have seen countless people's screens and browsers in all my years, and not one was using vertical tabs (though one put their start menu at the top).
Nice. How long did it take you to write this comment? Whenever I attempt stuff like this, it takes far longer than expected because I overcomplicate things
The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.
Owning things like Pocket is fine as long as each product stands on it's own. Melding them together is what upsets their user base.
100%. And companies don't seem to realize this. I'll use fakespot, but there is absolutely no use for it to be an inbrowser app, and the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening. That said, I appreciate that service.
Pocket can stay or leave. I don't care one way or the other. I never understood its usecase.
I never understood its usecase.
I used to use it when I was browsing the web at work. If I was reading something at the end of the day, or if it was something I didn't want to read at work, I'd give it a pocket bookmark. Then I could pull out my phone and finish right where I left off during my train commute.
Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don't trust amazon's own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
Noo! I loved Pocket. It's integrated into my Kobo eReader. It was the only good way to get articles easily synced on to an eReader. I hope Kobo buys Pocket. Or Rakuten, since that's a tech company and they own Kobo.
I used it extensively on my Kobo as well. So nice to be browsing on my phone and see long articles to read and just save them to enjoy on a nice eink screen later when I have time.
Supposedly Wallabag works Kobo readers. Most people self host Wallabag but I think they do have a hosted option as well.
Similarly, I used p2k (Pocket to Kindle). My use case was to clip things with Pocket, which would then automatically send them to my Kindle, where I prefer reading longer articles and books. Retroactively, kind of my fault for being an earlier adopter of a locked-down device like the Kindle from a massive corporation and never moving on from it...
YES! No more Pocket button sticking out like a sore thumb!
It literally takes 5 seconds to remove it.
No time, need to shit post
But you can't remove pocket from firefox just disable it. Given that it wa also a close source binary blob that made firefox not completely open source I'm glad it's going.
Thx for this.
Also, shout-out to https://karakeep.app/ (formerly "Hoarder")
Thank you! Guess I’ll be trying something new.
Thanks - added to Pocket to read it later.
Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.
To be fair, I think they both existed as separate products first, before Mozilla bought them. I used both, but they should have never been integrated as a part of a browser...
Pocket is the sort of shit that makes me embarrassed to recommend Firefox.
“Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire”
This is a misleading statement. 86% of Mozilla’s funding is from google. Modern web browsers are a fucked landscape designed to perpetuate googles dominance
I use Pocket since before Mozilla bought it. In combination with my kobo ereader, it changed the way I read the Internet for the better. Self hosting is no option for me and as far as I know Pocket was the best free read-it-later service. And the only one that worked seamless with Kobo. I really hope Rakuten buys it.
I really hope Rakuten buys it.
why do you think they won't enshittify it? they own viber, see what they did there. ads all over the app, some in channels you can't disable. once it asked me about the data collection I allow, I had to manually disable it with dozens of toggles for all their "business partners", and it took at least half an hour.
I don't know what viber is. I also don't think they won't enshittify it. I just hope to buy more time until a similar service or technology appears.
The fuck is a "read it later" service? Bookmarks?
It's significantly more accessible than trying to sync bookmarks with an Ereader's shitty browser
It also stripped the webpage to make it readable and mostly distraction-free, plus some services will also include tag suggestions to more easily find it later.
I used Pocket on my Kobo to read articles I saved, much easier to focus on the content and easy on the eyes with the eInk display.
Oh, you are missing so much...
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
Yup, just got a Kobo and absolutely love the Pocket integration... I hope some alternative is implemented...
As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?
Never used pocket, how does this differ from just having a bookmarks folder called "stuff to read while you're taking a shit"?
The difference is in convenience.
On the one hand, you can add a page to your bookmarks, after choosing the correct folder, of course.
On the other hand, you can click a button and a page gets automatically saved in your "read later" storage, with a description, summary, and a preview of the content.
Pocket saved an offline searchable archive of all of the article text. Multiple times I found articles I saved that were no longer online. So no, it's not the same as bookmarks
I don't save stuff with it but I read the articles that come up on desktop. so it's kinda like a community, subreddit, rss feed, whatever
Before pocket I was using instapaper, seems like it's still around. Bit of a shame about pocket, it's pretty useful
I use Inoreader as my RSS feed reader and it has a section to save webpages in a similar fashion.
Pocket won't be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I'd never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Amzn Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King's Misery) it's probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will "number must go up!" soon enough, too...
Nobody cared to use Pocket so its not surprising, btw what was that Fakespot thing?
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product's reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an "adjusted" aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I'm going to miss fakespot. I don't know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We've probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It's a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn't seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.
Alternative? 11Labs Reader will let you build an article library and will read them to you with superior voicing then pocket ever had.
Switched to LibreWolf after seeing the message about Fakespot. It was a heavily used browser add-on I used almost religiously since 2020. Mozilla acquired them in 2023 and then did nothing with it, letting it die. I'm so tired of this bullshit.
Is it free software?
Then anyone can make the improvements they want for it.
The moment I setup an Omnivore account, it gets acquired and dies, the moment I switch to Pocket it's dead lol, I think I'll just move to some open source self hosted read it later app like Karakeep
Wait, I didn't know Mozilla actually owned Pocket, I thought they just had a partnership or something...
I used to main Pocket back in the days when I had an iPod Touch 4G and older iPhone models, nowadays... It is storing articles from those days that I bet I haven't gotten to read 😂
Man, one gets a backlog of everything these days.
Why doesn't Mozilla change or add the MIT license to Pocket?
well shit, i loved pocket. i guess time to make my own del.icio.us social bookmarking/saving app like i've been wanting to for years.
I've been using raindrop.io for years now and highly recommend checking it out
Pocket was silly, just use tabs and buy more RAM.
You don’t need to. Modem browsers will suspend unused tabs, cache them on drive and free up the memory, while quickly restoring as soon user activate them. On at least moderately fast systems this happens so quickly it’s hardly noticeable.
great way to run into rate limits tho
with that plus auto tab discard i can have plenty of tabs :)
The point was to have stuff to read when no connection, such as airplane. Which browser doesn't try to refresh the tab? Any setting that allows to cache to HDD on a mobile browser you know of?
It did that? That's nifty. Maybe a little deliberate for me, personally, with my adhd, but I can see how that would be very useful. Kind've a bummer that's gone, actually. Shoot. And there are no decent and trustworthy alternatives?
I enjoy pocket for the articles that come up on the new tab page. I’ve never once saved an article for later with it.
pocket I never used. I found it ugly and just s violation of privacy as it moved a service that should be local only, to external webservers. I can see why it's finally had the plug pulled
It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you've been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the "articles" it suggested to you were actually ads). I can't say as I'm too sad to see it go.
Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they're bullshit anyway.
Nah, it's completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there's no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.
the main thing with pocket and services like it is that it saves and syncs entire pages. like a local internet archive.
Idiots. Buying a perfectly good service just to shut it down. I wonder if they even bothered looking for a buyer.
Also that new logo with the flag sucks.
Everything good to halfway decent must die on the alter of cost cuts, but nevermind and never notice that they're investing all of the savings on dubious junk like AI.
Really disappointed to lose Pocket. I am a big user of it and found it very convenient to save articles of interest as well as collecting anything that looked interesting that I might want to read. Have both the Android app and use it on the desktop.
Now I'm going to have to find a substitute.
I liked the concept but immediately thought "this is gonna get dropped eventually and I'll lose all the shit I saved". Looks like I was right.
Let us know if you find a replacement. I have pocket on my e-reader and I’m going to miss it
Perhaps Wallabag, a self-hostable service to save and categorize articles?
Based on https://fedia.io/m/selfhosted@lemmy.world/t/2206365/Alternatives-to-MZLA-Pocket I'm going to try Wallabag and/or Readeck. Probably the critical issue is whether you can self-host or not:
Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they're all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.
If you use KoReader, you can use Wallabag for the same purpose.
I'll have to see if I want to go to the rigamarole of setting up Wallabag on my home server or if I just fall back to using GoodLinks on iOS exclusively and forgo articles on my e-reader.
I liked it at first until the recommendations became more-and-more advertorial slop.
I used it like 3 times before deciding my read later functionality is already and better served by the 206 tabs I will never look at.
Pocket is one service of theirs I did use from time to time. Save an article you want to read later without committing it to a bookmark.
Wish they'd make bookmark not suck so much that using them felt like a commitment to organisationnal chores. The bookmark system is largely unchanged since the netscape days.
You cant search texts inside bookmarks because they only store the url. Which will break. Instead of saving the html itself, as if we still only has hundreds of gigabytes.
It should have a library level search system, capable of not just symbol text but intelligent summarization, categorization, search by relecant, content discovery algorithm, rss feed support all fully local, offline capable.
The whole thing, metadata, html, inages, video, files, code, replay of the changes over time. Yes I should be able to replay clicking "read more" as I expand comments on facebook. I should not lose my work to a page reload ever again. And no that's nor "too much space". Web pages are largely text sent super efficiently it is not that much information even compared to a gigabyte.
Why don't they just open it up to let people run their own Pocket services? The usual "proprietary code" excuses make no sense for an organization like Mozilla and it's being end of lifed anyway. Just dump it on a repo somewhere and let people hack on it if they want to. Why isn't this part of the sunsetting plan?
code has been open for about 10 years. it was a binary blob to begin with but nowadays it's all here
Welp, I've taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.
part of me thinks "great, those things were annoying"
another part of me thinks it's a harbinger
I wouldn't disagree that firefox is about to get enshittififed but I hope its not true.
Shutting down two things that had no business being built in their browser, to replace them with more stuff that have no business being built in their browser.
Mozilla really embraced the "corporation must corporate" motto.
to replace them with more stuff that have no business being built in their browser.
what stuff do you mean? I mean, certainly not vertical tabs because they are useful, lots of firefox users like it. not me, but the world does not revolve around me, so..
The real Pocket is the Google money they made along the way.
I wanted to like pocket, but I never really understood the point of it when I was already using Reddit or Google News to curate what I liked to read about. Was it more privacy oriented?
I found that articles in pocket were actually well written and didn't make you pull your hairs out
An recommendations for Pocket-Alternatives? I save articles on my phone and desktop and read on my tablet…
Instapaper is still going strong.
Apple also has Reading List built into safari and iPhone.
Wallabag and Karakeep are popular open source apps
Just started using Linkwarden, been cool so far.
Is this cause of the money they lost from the google thing?
fuck, I'm using the Pocket plugin a lot :[
not for proper bookmarking, just to mark where I was in longer videos and webcomics, 1 click on/off, easy
Mozilla has tried so many things: I wonder if anyone there has considered releasing and maintaining a browser. They might have some luck against Chrome.
shame about pocket - wonder how much of a hole that really burned in their pocket - if much
The first paragraph is not true. Mozilla is backed by a billionaire or billionaires, for example Google and Microsoft where the majority of Mozilla revenues comes from them. Stop deceiving people!
They're not billionaires. They're corporations.
I try to support Mozilla (and more obscure open source projects we take for granted) through donations and subscriptions. But I never used Pocket or Fakespot.
I don’t think it should be a forced payment but I’d pay a few bucks a month for a true developer edition. The current one is essentially just the early beta for extension developers but something really developer focused with no bullshit and developer tools at the forefront. I don’t know if that’s something other people would pay for but I feel like it’s easier to shell out cash when I’m using it for work. A lot of people could probably expense it.
It likely wouldn’t replace the Google money but it’d be a start.
Mozilla! Stop doing stupid stuff!
I never used Pocket itself, but I do like having the grid of news articles on the new tab page, which I believe is powered by Pocket in some shape or form. Anyone know if that feature is going away too?
It's just a fancy history, it has nothing to do with pocket.
Pocket absolutely would suggest you articles (and ads) by default unless you explicitly told it not to in your settings. This is separate from the tiles of frequently visited pages from your history.
The second slider down is your history/pinned shortcuts on the home screen. The third one is recommended junk, "Powered by Pocket."
More info on that here, for however long this will do anyone any good:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-recommendations-firefox-new-tab
Welp, guess I better start up the calibre extension to send pocket articles as a file for ebook readers.
I hated it at first but then I started to leave pocket on and click links every now and then since I figured they got revenue out of it. I don't use it often but its a shame to see it go now that I kind of like it.
I tried pocket a couple of times but couldn't get past the "we think you're on a phone so you're only getting three items on the screen at once". Well I'm not on a phone, I'm on a desktop with a 32" monitor and three T-Rex sized items on my screen is just terrible design.
i literally JUST installed fakespot lol
Mozilla should fire their non-technical staff, strongly make the case for how they're fighting for a free and open internet, and use a subscription model for Firefox to pay the bills
Nobody is paying a subscription to use a browser they can get for free.
Enough internet users are familiar with the adage "if a product is free, you are the product", through personal experience
I'd be OK with paying for Firefox if it meant that it was stripped of all association with advertisers. And presumably, if Mozilla were freed from that association, they'd be able to make a stronger case for how they're protecting a free internet
Good. I've been disabling this shit in about:config for one decade too many.
