- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.world
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.world
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
Keepa is better, and depending on whether you’re conspiratorial, not compromised as 3Camels was accused of some years ago.
Compromised?
3Camels was, maybe still is, fully dependent on the Amazon affiliate program. A program that was reduced at one point, killed off 3Camels competitors, but not 3Camels. Then Amazon asked them to stop tracking during Covid for a time which they did.
This is around the time that I heard about Keepa which has a different model, not solely Amazon but other stores too, and not paid via affiliates program.
Also it’s just faster. 3Cs was getting super slow to notify. You’d get an email, click and surprise, that sale was over yesterday.
I probably heard about the controversy on Reddit at the time but there’s a chance I found this site here which covers some of my recollections.
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.
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??
I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don’t sync work and personal devices.
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.
They literally have control of and log every app that’s installed and will bug you until you uninstall it.
Unless they’re doing app signing or binary examination, some of the methods to “log every app” literally look for an executable name. Renaming “firefox.exe” to “explorer.exe” (an obviously allowed executable name) and then executing it will still run Firefox.
Yeah, I don’t know how they’re doing it. They’re using some “zero trust” system. It’s beyond me.
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.
Fakespot was what finally convinced my wife to leave chrome. Fuck these fuckers.
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.
Check out LinkedIn for this
Edit: multiple days later… Linkwarden not linkedin…
if you happen to be an apple person Safari’s Reading List can save pages offline.
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.
Why would you need a saas solution if it’s for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
…so that you can read it on a device other than the one you’ve initially opened the link on? I can save a link to Wallabag from my laptop’s browser at home, have my e-reader sync it, and then read it offline while on a train.
what OS does your ereader run? can it run syncthing? can it open HTML?
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
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.
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
Wasn’t it possible to remove that button?
Possible: yes
Convenient: no
It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.
?
You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.
Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.
You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
And then people get all pissy when Google or Microsoft show a pop-up of a new feature…
Yes, Microsoft is especially bad in this regard. For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending. They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen. And youtube premium, oh boy.
For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending
This is… not quite related to the topic, no? Trial ending warning is not a “hey, here’s a new feature you might want to try out”.
They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen
Could you elaborate? I used to use Edge as my daily driver, now it’s my secondary browser. I have no clue what you mean here.
Not speaking of edge here, but the Microsoft fabric/power platform. They tried to sell me some feature for months and eventually i missclicked and started the trial. Now they are notifying that the trial ends in x days and they’ve been extending it so it never ends
In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features. If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in. Anything beyond that is inherently predatory.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification, so you can easily disable it the first time they become relevant. If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features
This is exactly how it works in things like Office or Edge.
If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in
Yup. Or unless a new feature is introduced, in which case a new pop-up appears. That’s precisely how it works.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification
Edge, most of the time, just opens a new tab with “Your Edge was updated” and a list of new things.
If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
If it was about the same feature that you already dismissed - yeah, I get the sentiment. If it’s about completely new things - it’s a really weird thing to say. How are users supposed to know that something new was introduced? Sift through thousands of lines of changelogs…?
If the user has indicated that they are not interested in new features, it means they do not care about new features. They don’t want to know about them, or they prefer to find out proactively in their own time. If you still insist on ramming notifications down their throat at that point, you’re not doing it for the user. You’re doing it for yourself.
Right. And then we see comments like the one that started this thread: “whoa, there was a Pocket integration??”
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
No! Use your power for good! Switch to Facebook and X!
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.
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.
Yeah I’ve been using pocket since it was Read It Later. I got shit in there going back about 15 years I guess I’ll be exporting and finally going through lmao.
deleted by creator
Why doesn’t Mozilla change or add the MIT license to Pocket?
It’s a service. It doesn’t just run in the browser.
It SHOULD!
the main point of it afaik is access from other mechines, and different kinds of devices. how did you imagine it?
Something like RES maybe… supply your own storage?
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.
I’m already on my second ‘Watch Later’ playlist on YT.
How does a second Watch Later playlist work?
Just a playlist named “Watch Later 2” where I save videos.
Ah, so it is manual work? I mean nothing to do with YouTube handling.
Not after filling up the first one ;)
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).
I use them. My screen has much more horizontal real estate than vertical.
i have seen a few do it. i don’t get it either.
I use vertical tabs because horizontal tabs use more screen in wide aspect ratios (16:9 or greater) and I want to optimize my screen usage for the actual content, rather than the tabs.
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.
The fuck is a “read it later” service? Bookmarks?
Can you pull up a bookmarked item to read when you don’t have an active network connection? If yes, that’s a “read it later” service. If no, then that’s why they are useful.
So saving a page.
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.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
Why go through that hassle if you can avoid it in the first place?