Mozilla Acquires Pocket and Its More Than 10 Million Users (recode.net) 82
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, is buying Pocket, the read-it-later service, for an undisclosed amount. Pocket, which is described by Mozilla as its first strategic acquisition, will continue to operate as a Mozilla subsidiary. Founder Nate Weiner will continue to run Pocket, along with his team of about 25 people. Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, lets users bookmark articles, videos and other content to read or view later on the web or a mobile device. It's great for things like saving offline copies of web articles to read on plane rides or subway commutes, especially where internet access is sparse. Pocket, which was founded in 2007, has more than 10 million monthly active users, according to a rep. That's not bad, but suggests it's still a fairly niche service, especially as big firms like Facebook and Apple build simple "reading list" features into their platforms.
MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Love! (Score:5, Insightful)
If feels like someone at Mozilla is deeply in love with the Pocket founder. First, they integrated Pocket into Firefox in what seemed little more than an attempt to leverage the browser to bring more business to Pocket. I don't know how well that went, but now they're delivering him a very sweet Valentine's Day gift of a (presumably) large pot of money to keep on doing what he was doing before.
Love doesn't have to be rational, and Pocket doesn't have to advance the goals of Firefox.
Re: (Score:1)
No, Nate Weiner (the founder of Pocket) has a wife.
And so did Little Richard, Rock Hudson, Elton John and numerous other closeted gay men.
Re: (Score:1)
That isn't to say he is closeted and gay, but simply saying that someone has a wife is not a definitive statement on their sexuality. Plus the person you responded to is clearly some bigoted troll so fuck them.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know how well that went
Me neither, but I do know that when they did that, it was the first time I got the feeling from Firefox that I get from IE and Chrome: that the browser has become actively hostile to me.
Re: (Score:2)
What does this have to do with making a simple, secure, extensible browser?
That's easy: They can now broadcast to Pocket users not using FireFox: Pocket(TM) works best with FireFox(TM)! -- while making sure that Pocket works sub-optimally with other browsers.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, why not chastize Google for all the non-search engine stuff they do
People do, routinely.
or Apple for diversifying into cellphones?
Because iPhones have made 100s of billions of dollars for Apple whereas Mozilla's products outside of Firefox have all been abject failures and have been canceled one after the other?
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Yes it is a success as a niche, toy language.
Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowhere does it say anything about
In fact, it doesn't even say anything about a browser. Their mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web. Whether they are making any progress with that is up for debate, but it's silly to complain about the browser every time you see the word "Mozilla". Mozilla the organization is bigger than Firefox.
Re: (Score:3)
No, it isn't. Or at least it shouldn't be. When their entire goal was to make a browser, they did good work. Everything since then has watered down their effort and caused them to lose focus on the one thing they absolutely needed to have win in order to achieve their goals. They should be completely shut down other than Seamonkey/Firefox.
Re: (Score:1)
Thunderbird is the primary competitor to Outlook. Web-based email portals are all a joke compared to client-side email programs. Killing Mozilla Thunderbird would be a hard blow to openness.
Re: MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! (Score:3)
(Un)fortunately(?) Mozilla already essentially haulted development on Thunderbird except for security and compatibility patches.
Re: (Score:2)
It's more like when there was no competition in the browser space they looked good by default. They were competing against an IE6 browser that'd been out of development for years. Now they're competing against weekly updates of Chrome, Edge, Safari and others.
Re: (Score:2)
Spot on. No idea why this was modded down, and I can do nothing to correct that myself today.
Re: (Score:2)
Having a popular browser is the best way to achieve their goals. Look at how Google deprecated Flash by slowly removing it from Chrome. Or how they get to decide which technologies live or die by implementing them or not.
If Firefox was 50% of the browser market and decided to, say, make WebGL and HTML Canvas access click-to-play they would break 50% of the browser fingerprinting that goes on and send a very clear statement that user privacy is important. Send a bogus font list in response to Javascript quer
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What happened to "Do one thing, and do it well"?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I think they have given up on being a popular browser.
I used Pocket back when it was Read It Later. I found I would just add stuff to my list for reading one day, on the plane, and never do it. I'd load the laptop up with movies and then end up watching the in-flight entertainment. Might as well use /dev/null.
Huh? (Score:2)
What does this have to do with making a simple, secure, extensible browser?
What does making a simple, secure, extensible browser have to do with Mozilla?
Re:What does this have to do... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The classic example of a company in its terminal stages; management pumps money out of it to their friends pockets.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm no fan of pocket, it's disabled in my Firefox, but let's be fair, it does a little bit more than just bookmarks. You can view articles offline, which is still an issue for people who fly a lot (maybe other kinds of transport too) - you can see an article on your desktop browser that you want to read on your flight later, just pocket it and it's done. It does quite a good job of cleaning up pages, kinda like FF reading mode, and joining unnecessarily multi-page articles into a single document, at least o
Re: (Score:2)
I remember how IE5 was able to save a web page into a single file, with pictures, then Firefox couldn't do that and still can't without extensions.
Also, local bookmarks are subject to data loss (hard disk crash, theft, etc.) and link rot. I wish I had a solutions for all these issues a few years back. Bookmarks suck, tabs suck, history lacks useful sorting/filtering/searching options (and might disappear anyhow)
Pocket? The thing i instantly disabled in FF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Never heard of it.
Re: (Score:3)
10 million users in only 10 years. At that astounding rate they'll be significant by the year 2500 or so.
In the meantime a google search of "disable pocket" gets 925,000 results.
Re: (Score:2)
Donations (Score:2, Insightful)
Did they pay for this with the money they received from donations?
Re:Donations (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
You are hungry and need to buy food. You are also a drug addict.
You get a government handout expressly for buying things you need (food), and not things you don't (drugs). You also have some amount of your own money.
You need food so you simply spend out the government's money on food.
All other money you have is available to cover any shortfall in need on the food side OR your drugs.
Despite the restriction, the handout still enables you to spend more money on the restricted thing.
Worse, if the handout is i
Firefox sake... (Score:1)
Would people please stop leaving comments about how terrible Mozilla is. It's like watching a child poking a dying animal with a stick.
So in other words... (Score:1)
Someone else to steal our original content, strip away the ads and make it available to a select audience while profiting on it. Great.
Re: (Score:2)
Pocket, for idiots who don't know about bookmarks or the clipboard
That's no good, I use the clipboard to store my daily backups. Fortunately, I've never had to restore from it, but it's good to practise safe security habits just in case.
How to Disable Pocket on Firefox. (Score:5, Informative)
1. Open new tab
2. Type about:config in address bar and accept warning
3. In the search box type pocket
4. Toggle extensions.pocket.enabled to false
I do this for all new Firefox installations. Also disabled hello (aka loop) until they removed it.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know how many tabs that was, but try the 52 beta with multiprocess mode turned on. Also, while it seems counterintuitive, you probably want the 32-bit version of Firefox even on a 64-bit OS. The 64-bit version does very little aside from using more RAM.
Too much money (Score:4, Insightful)
Nate Weiner = Chad Weiner's son (Mozilla) (Score:2)
No, Chad Weiner of Mozilla is the father of Nate Weiner of Pocket:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/author/cweinermozilla-com/
Does this mean Pocket will be open source now? n/t (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this mean Pocket will be open source now?
Re: (Score:1)
Yes. That is the plan, according to this Mozilla employee: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5wio45/mozilla_acquires_pocket/deadcf7/