9 ms·

I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 202

I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction. I'd probably be applauding the decision to shut this down if I thought they were doing it to free up resources to increase their focus on the browser, but Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise, so I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration and other stuff that nobody asked for. Meanwhile, Firefox is still missing proper support for a bunch of modern web features like view transitions and CSS anchor points that are available in every other browser.

1oooqooq 1y ago
missing features at this point is laudable. most features are useless design clutter (view transition being the poster child) or privacy nightmares pushed by google for their ad business (all the way back to full url referr to floc)
somethingor 1y ago
> every other browser You can just say Chromium
- zymhan 1y ago
  Safari exists, and is quite popular.
  - thayne 1y ago
    Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.
    - skrtskrt 1y ago
      Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year. I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?
      - toyg 1y ago
        Devs like WebKit because it's easy to integrate in non-browsers.
        skrtskrt 1y ago
        Like for desktop apps? I guess this differs fundamentally from Chromium in that... you do not run the "entire" browser like in Electron?
        fkfyshroglk 1y ago
        I thought that electron == chrome
        fkfyshroglk 1y ago
        ...is there a better reason to like webkit? Chromium certainly doesn't make effort to seem appealing to developers outside of its association with WebKit.
      - thesuitonym 1y ago
        Since when? I don't see any mention on the blog, and the FAQ still says they're not targeting anything other than MacOS. https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support
        skrtskrt 1y ago
        It was officially announced late February/early March I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073
  - isodev 1y ago
    Unfortunately, Safari is also pivoting towards ads in the form of “Help Apple to…”, services and that thing AI companies now call Personal Context. It’s not a bad browser just you wouldn’t pick it for privacy.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform. Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
    - criddell 1y ago
      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.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        >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 company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.
        MaxBarraclough 1y ago
        > 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-the-clean-windows-install-an-oxymoron/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/windows-11-has-made-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )
      - EasyMark 1y ago
        That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.
        1y ago
- shiomiru 1y ago
  I was curious what "view transitions" are even about: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/ It's yet another 2.8k line specification solely authored by Google employees, introducing a brand new complexity monster (clones of ghost elements represented as a pseudo-element tree) to... make it easier to add fancy animations. Now what I really miss is a "disable CSS animations" button. I find them very distracting and an unnecessary burden on battery life.
  - nsonha 1y ago
    That is the generic way to implememt transitions. Alternative is playing css artist and handwrite every single animation. It is also complex. I hate css animations too btw.
ls-a 1y ago
I also used them before rebranding or even being acquired by Mozilla. I saved some bookmarks then they locked me out because they switched to a paid model. I deleted that app then. Very shortly after i heard they were acquired.
fkfyshroglk 1y ago
> A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction. Interesting. I saw it as a glorified bookmarking service and saw the readability concerns as what raised red flags for me: mozilla just inherently isn't interested in competing on value rather than on marketing.
- nimbius 1y ago
  the internet is no longer designed to be readable. it is designed to be profitable.
  - Henchman21 1y ago
    Its also no longer designed for users, but for the advertisers and bots.
  - fkfyshroglk 1y ago
    Yea, but that matters less than you think in this context as what I want (a bookmark service for bookmarks) matters a lot less than how the service is marketed and funded.
- laweijfmvo 1y ago
  they really went out of their way to include as many "Why" sections and links as possible without saying a single word about why.
- Multicomp 1y ago
  They killed off the live bookmarks feature that I still miss in favor of this and it was never the same. My rss feeds are still around from then. Glad I didn't invest in this fad.
  - fkfyshroglk 1y ago
    There is still no solid way to persist RSS feeds (...especially the content they actually refer to) to private storage. Any serious archiving service today will need to undertake snapshotting a website as it stands without relying on such sickly, secondary signals. ...but where RSS is reliable, yes, it's amazing.
major505 1y ago
Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects. Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
- doubled112 1y ago
  And Thunderbird?
  - kbrosnan 1y ago
    It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.
    - edoceo 1y ago
      How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.
      - boomboomsubban 1y ago
        Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.
        Henchman21 1y ago
        Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.
        boomboomsubban 1y ago
        It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit
nine_k 1y ago
> available in every other browser Isn't it because almost every "other browser" reuses the Chromium engine? Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?
  - maigret 1y ago
    For users it’s called “putting all your eggs in one basket”
  - Lutger 1y ago
    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 basically be only one left.
    - fuzztester 1y ago
      what happened to opera? i used it a good amount earlier, when it was relatively new, but then some issues happened, which I don't remember clearly, then i stopped tracking it.
      - lawrencejgd 1y ago
        It's owned by a chinese company and uses Chromium
      - Arrowmaster 1y ago
        If you want old Opera look into Vivaldi. It's run by old staff from Opera pre sale. Current Opera is owned by a Chinese company with ties to pay day loans and other shady behaviors.
bayindirh 1y ago
I have another theory, actually. I'm also a very old user, since the first days of the service, and I don't know how many saves I have it inside (will see when my export arrives). The latest iteration's search was abysmal, and I normally refrain from using strong words. It failed to find exact matches from titles, the words or excerpts I know that exist in the article I'm searching for, and as a result, it became a FIFO basically. Unless you consume the list directly, hitting something you are looking for was nigh impossible. After being berated by support to use the search "properly", I started to build my own app, a TUI tool to curate the list, but it was going slow. Honestly, I'm a bit relieved now since I'm free from developing that software, and I can dig the data in my own terms. BTW, my export is just arrived, and it's a series of CSV files which has the usual suspects as columns. I can import this into a SQLite and dive the way I want. One less thing to worry about, but this doesn't mean I'm not bitter about its demise, too. Edit: It turns out I have ~37K saves. Whoa.
- lttlrck 1y ago
  What's your other theory? ;-)
  - j1elo 1y ago
    +1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- mikemcg0 1y ago
  Agree on search being abysmal - I'm surprised that none of these readings apps realized that the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet. perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.
  - twilo 1y ago
brodo 1y ago
> I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration And blockchain integration after that.
wodenokoto 1y ago
> When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company While strictly speaking it is not “always”, Mozilla has, in the colloquial sense, always been an internet advertising company. But they have mostly outsourced the advertising to Google.
PunchyHamster 1y ago
Mozilla appears to be retirement fund for incompetent CxOs...
bwat49 1y ago
I think firefox is going to end up like Opera lack of investment in gecko and dropping marketshare of firefox will result in more and more compatibility issues over time (which further accelerates dropping marketshare), until they're eventually forced to become another chromium based browser
- paradox460 1y ago
  A few years ago it was Safari that was the new IE, the one browser you had to go out of your way to support all its dumb little quirks. Firefox and Chrome+friends more or less "just worked" Now Firefox is moving into that role. Except Firefox has no killer captive audience. Safari was pushed because of iOS Mobile users. Firefox doesn't have that. So when you're a frontend dev at big corp, and you have to get stuff done now, targeting the quirks of a browser used by less than a tenthbof a percent of your userbase doesn't factor into the equation
  - politelemon 1y ago
    IE was not really about quirks, it was about it abusing its dominant position to do whatever it wanted, the quirks were a symptom. Safari is still the new IE. But yes to the rest, Firefox's lack of dominance will get worse if it fails to keep up.
strangescript 1y ago
If you look at their finances you will realize that there is nothing left in that company.
- modo_mario 1y ago
  You'd imagine they try to stretch it a bit rather than throwing it at the most ineffective charity projects they could come up with whilst firing staff.
soulofmischief 1y ago
I never wanted Pocket, it was forced upon us users initially and slowly made less obtrusive, but the damage was done. When I saw this headline, I cracked a wide smile; maybe there is hope for Firefox after all. I just want a browser that respects my freedom. Not a web platform with a dozen doodads and gizmos and AI review bots and weird partnerships.
- netsharc 1y ago
  Ah, Firefox, the overly attached browser: https://bug1791524.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9295397 https://bug1791524.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9295... (From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524)
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    A lot of developers and “UX” “experts” really don’t appreciate how extreme these modals are. They disrupt everyone a little bit, and for less-technical users can throw them off entirely. “Once per year” heh, add it to all the other disruptive shit they pop up and out on launch basically at random and they’re training users to dread launching the program. “Will it slap me in the face this time? If so, how hard?” Most modern programs have a problem with this, but FF is bad about it. And it’s just a fucking browser! Why? Why do this crap?
    - netsharc 1y ago
      Thinking about it, most users probably don't care about what programs they use, having it pop up with a "Thanks for loving me" must've been a WTF moment. Imagine if the calculator or stock app did that. Or the wrench in your toolbox...
90s_dev 1y ago
Firefox introducing tabs instantly made it more usable than IE. Then Chrome came out, and was always two steps ahead of Firefox. A month ago or so I added Firefox support for 90s.dev but for some reason they still don't support ES modules in service workers, which was a pain to work around (see https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/main.ts#L12-L14 https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/main.ts#L12... and https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/site/sw.ts#L1-L6 https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/site/sw.ts#... )
stevenhuang 1y ago
Not to mention general UI jank that is present for years. Start Firefox and right click anywhere to open the context menu. If it's the first time that specific menu is opened, you can a flash of nothing and then see a few frames of the css being inflated. Contrast that to Chrome and you don't get any sort of jank. Small things like this add up to an overall feel of unpolish.
mikesabat 1y ago
I was a user for so long I used to call this app instapaper.
- zomg 1y ago
  same here! we're dating ourselves... xD
  - rclkrtrzckr 1y ago
    That was when del.icio.us was still alive
- sethaurus 1y ago
  Apologies if I'm missing a joke, but Pocket used to be called "ReadItLater". Instapaper still exists and I imagine they're about to get an influx of Pocket refugees.
  - mikesabat 1y ago
    Not a great joke. Instapaper was really the first one that was read it later. I thought they just it down, but I just switched to Android and Instapaper is (maybe was) only iPhone. Del.icio.us was just bookmarks, no reader for the phone.
riffraff 1y ago
Same here, I was a readitlater user, recent iterations somehow broke it and it stopped syncing for offline viewing which was my main usage of it. Screw you Mozilla.
bambax 1y ago
> mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app That's a classic move: make it bad / observe that nobody uses it anymore / close it. Sometimes it's done on purpose, sometimes not, but the result is always the same.
pete1302 1y ago
"Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise" Indeed every stable software provider.
tempodox 1y ago
> …that are available in every other browser where “every other browser” == Chrome. Otherwise, agreed.

1oooqooq 1y ago

missing features at this point is laudable. most features are useless design clutter (view transition being the poster child) or privacy nightmares pushed by google for their ad business (all the way back to full url referr to floc)

somethingor 1y ago

> every other browser You can just say Chromium

zymhan 1y ago
Safari exists, and is quite popular.
- thayne 1y ago
  Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.
  - skrtskrt 1y ago
    Kagi is starting to build their Orion browser which is WebKit-based for Linux as of this year. I never do anything close enough to the browser engine to know, but apparently devs like WebKit a lot?
    - toyg 1y ago
      Devs like WebKit because it's easy to integrate in non-browsers.
      - skrtskrt 1y ago
        Like for desktop apps? I guess this differs fundamentally from Chromium in that... you do not run the "entire" browser like in Electron?
        fkfyshroglk 1y ago
        I thought that electron == chrome
      - fkfyshroglk 1y ago
        ...is there a better reason to like webkit? Chromium certainly doesn't make effort to seem appealing to developers outside of its association with WebKit.
    - thesuitonym 1y ago
      Since when? I don't see any mention on the blog, and the FAQ still says they're not targeting anything other than MacOS. https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#other_os_support
      - skrtskrt 1y ago
        It was officially announced late February/early March I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073
- isodev 1y ago
  Unfortunately, Safari is also pivoting towards ads in the form of “Help Apple to…”, services and that thing AI companies now call Personal Context. It’s not a bad browser just you wouldn’t pick it for privacy.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform. Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
  - criddell 1y ago
    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.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >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 company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.
      - MaxBarraclough 1y ago
        > 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-the-clean-windows-install-an-oxymoron/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/windows-11-has-made-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )
    - EasyMark 1y ago
      That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.
      - 1y ago
shiomiru 1y ago
I was curious what "view transitions" are even about: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/ It's yet another 2.8k line specification solely authored by Google employees, introducing a brand new complexity monster (clones of ghost elements represented as a pseudo-element tree) to... make it easier to add fancy animations. Now what I really miss is a "disable CSS animations" button. I find them very distracting and an unnecessary burden on battery life.
- nsonha 1y ago
  That is the generic way to implememt transitions. Alternative is playing css artist and handwrite every single animation. It is also complex. I hate css animations too btw.

ls-a 1y ago

I also used them before rebranding or even being acquired by Mozilla. I saved some bookmarks then they locked me out because they switched to a paid model. I deleted that app then. Very shortly after i heard they were acquired.

fkfyshroglk 1y ago

> A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction. Interesting. I saw it as a glorified bookmarking service and saw the readability concerns as what raised red flags for me: mozilla just inherently isn't interested in competing on value rather than on marketing.

nimbius 1y ago
the internet is no longer designed to be readable. it is designed to be profitable.
- Henchman21 1y ago
  Its also no longer designed for users, but for the advertisers and bots.
- fkfyshroglk 1y ago
  Yea, but that matters less than you think in this context as what I want (a bookmark service for bookmarks) matters a lot less than how the service is marketed and funded.
laweijfmvo 1y ago
they really went out of their way to include as many "Why" sections and links as possible without saying a single word about why.
Multicomp 1y ago
They killed off the live bookmarks feature that I still miss in favor of this and it was never the same. My rss feeds are still around from then. Glad I didn't invest in this fad.
- fkfyshroglk 1y ago
  There is still no solid way to persist RSS feeds (...especially the content they actually refer to) to private storage. Any serious archiving service today will need to undertake snapshotting a website as it stands without relying on such sickly, secondary signals. ...but where RSS is reliable, yes, it's amazing.

major505 1y ago

Mozilla is more occupied this days paying multi milionary bonus to its executives and begging users for money they waste on useless projects. Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

doubled112 1y ago
And Thunderbird?
- kbrosnan 1y ago
  It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.
  - edoceo 1y ago
    How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.
    - boomboomsubban 1y ago
      Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.
      - Henchman21 1y ago
        Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.
        boomboomsubban 1y ago
        It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit

nine_k 1y ago

> available in every other browser Isn't it because almost every "other browser" reuses the Chromium engine? Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?

mvdtnz 1y ago
How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?
- maigret 1y ago
  For users it’s called “putting all your eggs in one basket”
- Lutger 1y ago
  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 basically be only one left.
  - fuzztester 1y ago
    what happened to opera? i used it a good amount earlier, when it was relatively new, but then some issues happened, which I don't remember clearly, then i stopped tracking it.
    - lawrencejgd 1y ago
      It's owned by a chinese company and uses Chromium
    - Arrowmaster 1y ago
      If you want old Opera look into Vivaldi. It's run by old staff from Opera pre sale. Current Opera is owned by a Chinese company with ties to pay day loans and other shady behaviors.

bayindirh 1y ago

I have another theory, actually. I'm also a very old user, since the first days of the service, and I don't know how many saves I have it inside (will see when my export arrives). The latest iteration's search was abysmal, and I normally refrain from using strong words. It failed to find exact matches from titles, the words or excerpts I know that exist in the article I'm searching for, and as a result, it became a FIFO basically. Unless you consume the list directly, hitting something you are looking for was nigh impossible. After being berated by support to use the search "properly", I started to build my own app, a TUI tool to curate the list, but it was going slow. Honestly, I'm a bit relieved now since I'm free from developing that software, and I can dig the data in my own terms. BTW, my export is just arrived, and it's a series of CSV files which has the usual suspects as columns. I can import this into a SQLite and dive the way I want. One less thing to worry about, but this doesn't mean I'm not bitter about its demise, too. Edit: It turns out I have ~37K saves. Whoa.

lttlrck 1y ago
What's your other theory? ;-)
- j1elo 1y ago
  +1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
mikemcg0 1y ago
Agree on search being abysmal - I'm surprised that none of these readings apps realized that the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet. perch.app is the newest entrant to this space, and it's the closest I've seen to getting this right.
- twilo 1y ago

brodo 1y ago

> I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration And blockchain integration after that.

wodenokoto 1y ago

> When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company While strictly speaking it is not “always”, Mozilla has, in the colloquial sense, always been an internet advertising company. But they have mostly outsourced the advertising to Google.

PunchyHamster 1y ago

Mozilla appears to be retirement fund for incompetent CxOs...

bwat49 1y ago

I think firefox is going to end up like Opera lack of investment in gecko and dropping marketshare of firefox will result in more and more compatibility issues over time (which further accelerates dropping marketshare), until they're eventually forced to become another chromium based browser

paradox460 1y ago
A few years ago it was Safari that was the new IE, the one browser you had to go out of your way to support all its dumb little quirks. Firefox and Chrome+friends more or less "just worked" Now Firefox is moving into that role. Except Firefox has no killer captive audience. Safari was pushed because of iOS Mobile users. Firefox doesn't have that. So when you're a frontend dev at big corp, and you have to get stuff done now, targeting the quirks of a browser used by less than a tenthbof a percent of your userbase doesn't factor into the equation
- politelemon 1y ago
  IE was not really about quirks, it was about it abusing its dominant position to do whatever it wanted, the quirks were a symptom. Safari is still the new IE. But yes to the rest, Firefox's lack of dominance will get worse if it fails to keep up.

strangescript 1y ago

If you look at their finances you will realize that there is nothing left in that company.

modo_mario 1y ago
You'd imagine they try to stretch it a bit rather than throwing it at the most ineffective charity projects they could come up with whilst firing staff.

soulofmischief 1y ago

I never wanted Pocket, it was forced upon us users initially and slowly made less obtrusive, but the damage was done. When I saw this headline, I cracked a wide smile; maybe there is hope for Firefox after all. I just want a browser that respects my freedom. Not a web platform with a dozen doodads and gizmos and AI review bots and weird partnerships.

netsharc 1y ago
Ah, Firefox, the overly attached browser: https://bug1791524.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9295397 https://bug1791524.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9295... (From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524)
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  A lot of developers and “UX” “experts” really don’t appreciate how extreme these modals are. They disrupt everyone a little bit, and for less-technical users can throw them off entirely. “Once per year” heh, add it to all the other disruptive shit they pop up and out on launch basically at random and they’re training users to dread launching the program. “Will it slap me in the face this time? If so, how hard?” Most modern programs have a problem with this, but FF is bad about it. And it’s just a fucking browser! Why? Why do this crap?
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Thinking about it, most users probably don't care about what programs they use, having it pop up with a "Thanks for loving me" must've been a WTF moment. Imagine if the calculator or stock app did that. Or the wrench in your toolbox...

90s_dev 1y ago

Firefox introducing tabs instantly made it more usable than IE. Then Chrome came out, and was always two steps ahead of Firefox. A month ago or so I added Firefox support for 90s.dev but for some reason they still don't support ES modules in service workers, which was a pain to work around (see https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/main.ts#L12-L14 https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/main.ts#L12... and https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/site/sw.ts#L1-L6 https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/site/sw.ts#... )

stevenhuang 1y ago

Not to mention general UI jank that is present for years. Start Firefox and right click anywhere to open the context menu. If it's the first time that specific menu is opened, you can a flash of nothing and then see a few frames of the css being inflated. Contrast that to Chrome and you don't get any sort of jank. Small things like this add up to an overall feel of unpolish.

mikesabat 1y ago

I was a user for so long I used to call this app instapaper.

zomg 1y ago
same here! we're dating ourselves... xD
- rclkrtrzckr 1y ago
  That was when del.icio.us was still alive
sethaurus 1y ago
Apologies if I'm missing a joke, but Pocket used to be called "ReadItLater". Instapaper still exists and I imagine they're about to get an influx of Pocket refugees.
- mikesabat 1y ago
  Not a great joke. Instapaper was really the first one that was read it later. I thought they just it down, but I just switched to Android and Instapaper is (maybe was) only iPhone. Del.icio.us was just bookmarks, no reader for the phone.

riffraff 1y ago

Same here, I was a readitlater user, recent iterations somehow broke it and it stopped syncing for offline viewing which was my main usage of it. Screw you Mozilla.

bambax 1y ago

> mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app That's a classic move: make it bad / observe that nobody uses it anymore / close it. Sometimes it's done on purpose, sometimes not, but the result is always the same.

pete1302 1y ago

"Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise" Indeed every stable software provider.

tempodox 1y ago

> …that are available in every other browser where “every other browser” == Chrome. Otherwise, agreed.