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.
Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire and our independence shapes everything we build. This independence allows us to prioritize bu
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.
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.
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.
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 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.