Now Pocket is basically yet another ... web portal? advertisement platform? social network? I do not know how to describe what it is now, other than useless.
nice... thanks, Mr. Babbage.
I don't recall it ever saving web pages in web view (though maybe you used to be able to see them offline when you used the premium plan, but now the premium plan doesn't save the WebView offline? I'm not interested enough in paying for it to find out so all I have is guestimation.).
So they do save, but they save as article view and not the webpage itself. Which is the same as the other services.
> Offline Downloading: Pocket will decide the best view to download by default. If you want to specify whether to download Article View, Web View, or both, uncheck Download Best View.
The article view was a nice novelty 10 years ago, but as it is completely based on heuristics (readerJS-like, in fact I think it _is_ readerJS ) and they have not really bothered upgrading it, it is no longer a reliable way to capture web sites for offline reading .
Frankly, I want this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ back :)
But you have reminded me, because I do recall that phrasing that you quoted about pocket deciding whether to choose Article or Web View.
I don't it's a particularly huge loss, and the exasperation from the commenter I was replying to seemed to suggest that they thought saving of any articles had been removed, which would be an appropriate cause for exasperation. But I don't think that reaction is warranted at all, just from not saving web view.
I also think it's not quite right to suggest that saved article view "doesn't work" or is a mere novelty. I just went through a bunch of my articles and randomly spot-checked them, and all of the ones saved to article view are without problems. Although I do recognize there's an occasional issue, but those are the exception rather than the rule. It remains a critical antidote to the unviewable overloaded with ads viewing experience that is the default experience for most people with most web pages. There's also an open secret that it bypasses login screens and pay walls, fir which it continues to be one of the best solutions.
But alas, I was not correct to suggest this had never previously been available.
- [B] https://spotbugs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/running.html (just completely mangled, starts with “-sortByClass=filepath:”, that is, skipping around half of the actual page)
- [W] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~dalyanda/mssecrets/hotmail.html
- [A] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~dalyanda/mssecrets/
- [B] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/types... (the “Note” inserts with important caveats are gone)
- [B] https://jimbojones.livejournal.com/23143.html (table at the end is gone so the sarcasm in the last sentence does not come through)
- [B] https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2018/07/kings-quest-vi-cliffs-... (screenshot after “At one point in this section it says...” is gone, leaving only the joke in the caption)
- [B] https://mtnphil.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/decompiling-sci-byt... (“Here are links to the rest [of the blogpost series]: [empty space]”.)
- [W] https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ucdigm/taken_me_yea... (I guess this one’s fair, I only saved it so I could later copy it to my quotes stash)
- [B] https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/ (“and it looked like this: [code snippet missing]”)
- [B] https://docs.rs/crossbeam/0.8.0/crossbeam/epoch/index.html (the actual reference, “Structs” / “Traits” / “Functions”, is cut off)
I don't think Pocket ever built itself with intended use cases being such things as looking at tables of server logs showing IP addresses (jimbojones) or Microsoft support pages, and I believe those are probably exactly the instances where switching to a web view exists to account for that.
If your deal-breaking use case is that you need an offline only archived web view of Microsoft support for a note about how "OpLock" means the same as "opportunistic lock" I think they're well within their rights to say that that's outside of their intended use cases, and that's what Web View (built into pocket) is for.
Certainly room for improvement, but they're just very idiosyncratic use cases. Do you get more success with those same pages on InstaPaper?
This one is a bit silly, I admit, but consider this one:
> Note: Your application should not perform any file system operations on the file between [calling CreateFile2] and [requesting an oplock]. Doing so may cause deadlocks.
I've used Pocket on and off since back when it was called Read It Later and I don't recall it ever offering this feature (offline access to saved web page versions of articles), at least not outside of the premium service.
So I tried my best Googling skills, which seems to have increasingly diminishing returns with every passing day, but I did find a LinkedIn article from 2017 noting that this archive of web page feature was premium even then.
(Edit: It's worth noting that InstaPaper doesn't offer this either. Nor does Raindrop, nor did Omnivore (RIP) although you could print to PDF and upload it to Omnivore. The only article saver service I'm aware of that does is Wallabag, which is self-hosted.)
>10. Premium options
>So far, every feature has been free. If you upgrade to a premium plan, you'll get other features, such as permanent copies of your articles in case they're removed from the web, suggested tags to make bookmarking even easier, and the removal of sponsored posts from Your List.
>This post was originally published on Proof Is In the Writing on July 20, 2017.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimat...
The setting was “Always fetch Web View”, next to the still-extant “Always fetch Article View”, and searching for that phrase will give you some contemporary discussions[1,2]; alternatively, Pocket’s own docs on the Wayback Machine[3] will tell you that, as recently as 2022 (and at least as early as 2012[4]),
> Pocket will download the “Best View” by default. To override this decision, you can configure Pocket to always download Article View, Web View, or both.
> It’s possible to control whether Pocket downloads Article or Web View:
> [...]
> 4. Enable Always fetch Article View, Always fetch Web View, or both
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/i...
[2] https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-poc... (disclaimer: I’ve never used the iOS version)
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getp... (I’m not sure it still worked at this point)
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpo...
Instead, maybe nobody will work in that project if you succeed in slandering Mozilla.
If you would look at their work and talk about it, it might be valid. This is just someone's hot take they posted on the Internet.
They also layed off tons of engineers. While giving the CEO the pay increase the same year.
Absolute trash of a human being and org.
Apparently the rewarding is opposite, to get Mozilla away from Firefox…
If Mozilla would have solely focused on Firefox and Thunderbird we could be in a better place right now.
I have no idea what the motivations of Mozilla are, but it is important to remember that many players in the industry faded away simply because the industry changes fast and those players failed to anticipate those changes. It is entirely possible that Mozilla was trying to anticipate those changes and ended up making a string of very bad bets.
Being one half of a duopoly is a pretty stable position. Just about the only way to lose it is to fuck around and quit playing the game. There's really no external force that could have destroyed Mozilla if they had just stayed focused.
Mozilla needed to be a browser company, trying to be an "everything" company was a really stupid move.
Do we have any assessment, other than people in comment sections randomly just saying so, that any of these actually came at the cost of developer resources on the core browser?
I feel like people have heard this repeated so many times that they keep saying it now. All of these issues were real, in 2016. And Firefox did the thing: they rebuilt the browser from the ground up under Quantum, achieving breakthrough performance and stability that everybody was asking for. And in the present day, the differences are real but subtle, and I don't think they have anything to do with the actual drivers of browser market share, which is about Google leveraging its unparalleled position in search and on Android.
Is the argument supposed to be that if the VPN wasn't there then like the tab snapping would work more smoothly and there would still be 35% market share? Once you start saying these things out loud, it becomes clear how nonsensical and vibes-based the whole argument is.
It's not to say that there's no concern with the pivot into erosions of privacy commitments. But it doesn't excuse the kind of tulip mania that seems to have spread across hn comment sections in reaction to every mention of Mozilla.
I keep pleading with people who perpetuate these narratives to try and make real arguments accountable to our usual standards of causation and substantiation, and they never do.
No, the argument is that if Mozilla didn't spend so much money on side projects, they wouldn't now be in such a precarious financial situation that they're making a drastic, controversial change with the stated purpose of ensuring their financial future. They might still have been poor stewards of the core browser project's technical development, but at least they'd have enough accumulated savings to continue without selling user data.
One person in this discussion claims they could live off the interest of $500 million invested in money markets. That's the level of seriousness and credibility so far.
Do you have something more substantive, with evidence, or are you just piling on an open source project and the people who work hard at it.
* Anything that goes to the Mozilla Foundation is not spent on Firefox or Thunderbird (by definition). * Mozilla Corporation (which spends money to maintain Firefox, and used to spend money on Thunderbird and is now separate and hence not considered in these numbers) sends some proportion of its income to the Mozilla Foundation. * We have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances which lists total revenue, total expenses and software development expenses (I did find https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/ that wikipedia page, but some of the links are broken, so I'm going to stick with wikipedia's numbers).
I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available (note that "software development expenses" would have likely included things like FirefoxOS, Pocket, MozillaVPN etc. but I suspect it's all going to come out in the wash anyway).
Since 2010, that pot that wasn't spent of software dev is $1.89 billion (which assuming $300 million a year on software dev which is above what Mozilla Corp spent every year bar 2019, is more than 6 years worth of funding). That doesn't include donations (as they all go to Mozilla Foundation).
The numbers are somewhat rubbery, but let me leave this note: why is it NOYB that is ensuring that the GDPR is being followed, rather than Mozilla?
>I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation or is otherwise not available
You're attempting to put under the under "otherwise not available" label things like legal and compliance, server, bandwidth, and infrastructure costs, all of which fall under the title of general operations in their audited statement. The marketing budget has gone up to 100 million but they are a global brand and I'm not sure that that's anything I'd consider out of the ordinary given their footprint.
I'm not sure I'm seeing anything like an aha moment where they're spending it on something I'd consider wasteful, or the cause and effect between that and some missed opportunity to invest more in development that would have driven changes to market share. (This was all supposed to be an argument about market share right?)
And at this point we're six or seven comments deep in a sub thread where people are attempting to backfill all of that data into arguments they committed to before having looked at it.
On some level, I hope that anyone reading this can appreciate that this whole exercise is ridiculous because what it's revealing is that no one really knows anything about most of these finances and are guessing and squinting and assuming and attempting to backfill arguments that they were perfectly comfortable making in the absence of this knowledge. And that, in and of itself is enough to prove my point that no one claiming that Mozilla's side bets compromised their company has any clue what they're talking about.
Not at all. Much or almost all the Foundation does benefits Firefox. (I think putting Thunderbird in the same sentence is an exaggeration of its importance.)
> I assume (which could totally be wrong) that "total expenses" minus "software development expenses" goes to the Mozilla Foundation
That's a big leap. Salary expense would be their biggest item, I would guess.
Can you be specific about how the Foundation benefits Firefox (because it can't use money)? As far as I know, the Foundation also never supported Thunderbird's development financially either (due to how they are organised).
As noted, I'm using the values I could quickly find, and wikipedia had a table I could read off. Given the numbers, I expect salaries to be under "software development expenses".
A couple of problems here. First, despite your protestations to the contrary, the argument for many is about market share. Secondly they're sitting on $1.2 billion in assets, so it's not that they're underwater, but that they're trying to diversify their income away from just Google.
I also have to note that you said no, but then proceeded to make an argument that bears the very form that I was criticizing.
You are saying that side bets (like the VPN) are what compromise their financial position. That's at least a coherent statement, but now comes the substantiating it and tracing out the cause and effect, articulating the actual scale of those investments, where it has the effect that you're claiming it does.
It takes more than just going ahead and saying it and it's weird that I have to keep pointing this out.
It's the kind of paradox of all of these Mozilla criticisms. "Do something to diversify your revenue. No, not that... Not that either."
The rest is hindsight. Unless, of course, you can tell us some sure bets right now?
I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive. They did the privacy stuff, and they did the side bets at the same time.
The side bets didn't come at the expense of privacy despite repeated breathless attempts to imply otherwise, mostly here in the backwaters of hn comment sections. That whole argument has been vibes all the way down and it's depressing to see so many people repeating it.
> I don't understand why you're framing this as though those were mutually exclusive.
They... didn't? If you frame it "mostly around (privacy and not being Google)" and not "(mostly around privacy) and (not being Google)". But even the "and" doesn't seem exclusive to me.
I'm juxtaposing one and two, but you seem to think I'm juxtaposing the two elements within two.
https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...
The previously mentioned side bets, e.g. VPNs, Pocket, Relay, Fakespot -- there's been a narrative attempting to imply that those involved a trade-off from, well, sometimes the argument was quality of the core browser experience, but in this particular variation it's suggesting that these side bets were a reason they couldn't maintain commitments to privacy.
The adtech purchases absolutely do raise an eyebrow, but they have nothing to do with this narrative that attempted to tie the side bets to compromises on privacy. If anything, I want to encourage them to do more of these, precisely because they don't involve any of those compromises and everyone seems to want them to diversify their sources of revenue in non-adtech directions.
If they had instead invested that money sensibly, they could have used it over time to do the only thing that the world wants from Mozilla: pay for developers to work on Firefox.
It's like a never-ending horde of zombies that keep coming and repeating the same argument. So as ever, my reply is going to be the same. Sure, they cost money, but they cost more or less, and they either do or don't cost engineering resources, and they cost more or less of those as well. Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets. No one can articulate the relative scale of the investment on side bets and what the impact is on engineering resources and no one can draw a connection between that and market share (if anything, it's the relatively inexpensive resource demand that probably made them attractive strategic options to begin with). And none of this is responsive to actual macro-level forces that drive market share, which is Google leveraging its footprint in the search space, in Android, and over Chromebooks to drive up its own market share.
And those are the things you would have to think through in order for any of that argument to work, not just hand-wave toward their possibility. The ability to trace cause and effect, the ability to assess the relative scale of different investments, these are all like the 101 level things that would sanity check the argument.
> Nobody can articulate what the missing browser feature is, that's not there because of this bet on side bets.
No it's not. Read the article linked: The adtech company is developing advertising solutions that preserve privacy, with the goal of changing the ad industry. It fits directly with Mozilla's core mission and also a long-time project they've pursued internally.
What is the definition they use?
I suspect you might be, paradoxically, doing the same as everyone else; piling on based on rumor or impression.
The notion of 'privacy preserving' ads, or that the data they are selling is not in some sense 'about you.'
I talk about this in a couple of other comments.
From one of your linked comments:
> Abstracted profiling still works, and digs deeper than you might suspect (I recall the netflix data that could predict interests across different categories, like people watching House of Cards also liking It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).
Abstracted profiling (if we're talking about the same thing) predicts things about the user - otherwise it wouldn't be valuable - but the question is whether it identifies the user.
> It's also just part of the long slow, death by one thousand cuts transformation into a company that doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy
They've been doing privacy-preserving ads for - a decade? It's not part of a transformation. The claim that Mozilla "doesn't have categorical commitments to privacy" would need to be stablished, unless 'categorial' means 'absolutely perfect in every way'.
Why don't you (and others) bother to read the link and find out the story. Why go out of your way to say stuff you don't know to bring down Mozilla?
Another issue is that when you get donations, they are usually more than needed, so FOSS devs get to work adding new features which make the product worse.
Consider Whatsapp, after 15 years we can count the added features in 1 or 2 hands. They manage to find great restraint, possibly related to a low engineer-personnel ratio.
FOSS engineer orgs have no chance at staying the course. It reminds me of the sex mantra, if they likes it just keep doing it don't do it harder.
Exact same thing happens with Wikipedia. But the community puts a halt to most initiatives and they have to keep doing spinoffs like wikidata and wikiuniversity and such
So I don't really see this being true. Also foundations shouldn't seek to grow but to keep doing why they do.
See how Wikipedia/Wikimedia, while both getting more money and providing almost the same service, still haven't updated how people can actually parse their content but, at least, didn't start selling data.
But I think it's the paid subscriptions that are the main channel of personally contributing revenue towards the part of the organization that develops the browser.
Does EFF do anything in the standards process? They're not an implementer, and they don't employ devs which work on browsers (as far as I know).
EFF does a number of things such as advocate for web standards that don't benefit Google at the expense of other browsers. They get involved in legal action and legislating and they publish privacy badger, an extension that blocks tracking. My understanding is they also worked with Mozilla to stand up Le's Encrypt as a broadly accessible way to access HTTPS.
The users can't pay; there is no way to give Mozilla money for Firefox.
Can you elaborate further?
It is a not-feature ("X without Y and Z"), and it is hard to capitalize on. Also, what purpose can be served today with even the die-hard Linux guys I know are willing to succumb to binge-watch on TikTok or any other popular app so that there appears to be some double standard and/or lost battle since you cannot prevent data gathering in the public service or transportation, carriers, hotels that combined more than compensate for any measures taken by a "privacy first" browser, security leaks not to mention.
Just curious about clarification.