- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.world
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.world
- selfhosted@lemmy.world
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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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.
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.
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’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.
They are probably scanning for the binary file executable.
There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
I forgot what it is called but there is an extension that syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium browsers.
If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don’t sync work and personal devices.
i used to use pocket all the time back in the day. slowly realized there arent many articles worth saving for later let alone reading at all.
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?
I’ve found it useful enough not too long ago, mostly for comparing Amazon’s pricing differences for identical products between various EU countries.
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.
Thanks!
Never heard of this. Sounds useful, except I’m really only buying something from them because I need it quickly most of the time. I don’t have the convenience of waiting for price drops like I do with Steam games haha. Thanks for sharing!
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
I’ve found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.
based
Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I’ve had is to ignore any off brand looking product that’s been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it’s for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
didn’t fakespot only work in the USA?
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn’t tell ya.
I use Fakespot but wasn’t aware it was a Mozilla product.
The bought it out. It was originally an extension.
still is as far as I know. I am using it.
Not for much longer
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
“Read once bookmark”. Problem solved.
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.
well they are terminating it for a reason.
From the 404media article on the subject:
The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers.
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
We did, internet! We killed Pocket!
Nobody cared to use Pocket so its not surprising, btw what was that Fakespot thing?
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product’s reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an “adjusted” aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I’m going to miss fakespot. I don’t know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
Pocket is one service of theirs I did use from time to time. Save an article you want to read later without committing it to a bookmark.
Wish they’d make bookmark not suck so much that using them felt like a commitment to organisationnal chores. The bookmark system is largely unchanged since the netscape days.
You cant search texts inside bookmarks because they only store the url. Which will break. Instead of saving the html itself, as if we still only has hundreds of gigabytes.
It should have a library level search system, capable of not just symbol text but intelligent summarization, categorization, search by relecant, content discovery algorithm, rss feed support all fully local, offline capable.
The whole thing, metadata, html, inages, video, files, code, replay of the changes over time. Yes I should be able to replay clicking “read more” as I expand comments on facebook. I should not lose my work to a page reload ever again. And no that’s nor “too much space”. Web pages are largely text sent super efficiently it is not that much information even compared to a gigabyte.
What you’re describing is so much more difficult from a technical standpoint than you give it credit.
Static pages – sure, the plague of single page applications – oof, that’s a challenge.
I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot. “Save Webpage” is useless nowadays because everything is loaded externally through scripts. What if it saved a timeline of requests and responses somehow and could play it back? This might require recording the entire JS state though… and so much more with browser APIs. Saving just the requests+responses as a cache would fail if the scripting was non-deterministic. Maybe it would make sense to literally save a “recording” of the HTML and CSS changes, playing back only the results of any network requests or JS?
This would be a whole new pipeline to make interactivity work. Emulating a server with cached responses would allow to reuse the JS part of websites and is easier to do. I have no doubt that some pages wouldn’t work and there would be a shitton of security considerations I can’t imagine.
We can save entire operating systems in that way, the heavy burden is borne by the hardware, as far as the software is concerned it is to dump the memory snapshot of the engine into a file and reload it later.
I mean, it’s been almost 30 years and this aspect hasn’t evolved because of a long expired belief that we will be able to re-download it all later as if the internet wasn’t eventually going to churn over and all links will eventually break.
Ok, so your average site doesn’t download content directly. The initial load is just the framework required to fetch and render the content dynamically.
Short of just crawling the whole site, there is no real way to know what, when or why a thing is loaded into memory.
You can’t even be sure that some pages will stay the same after every single refresh.Comparing it to saving the state of OS isn’t fair because the state is in one place. On the machine running the code. The difference here is that the state of the website is not in control of the browser and there’s no standard way to access it in a way that would allow what you’re describing.
Now, again, saving rendered HTML is trivial, but saving the whole state of a dynamic website require a full on web crawler and then not only loading saved pages and scripts, but also emulating the servers to fetch the data rendered.
It could crawl elements within the DOM to save a word cloud of visible text for each bookmark as metadata for later searches. I think it’s doable. Separating nonvisible and visible stuff is very difficult though.
This is supported, but not integrated in bookmark lookup. I mean, if you hit ctrl+s, the browser will save currently rendered HTML. No crawling required. Hooking up some text indexing for search seems perfectly doable.
I understand a VM isn’t the same since at least it is somewhat self-contained.
But at the end of the day, a browser does end up showing you something and has a stable state waiting for your input. These stable moments are like checkpoints or snapshots that can be saved in place, the whole render engine state machine. And that can be saved at multiple times, similar to how internet archive takes periodic static snapshots of websites.
It should be trivial, a one-click action for the user to save the last couple of these checkpoint states to a format that can be consulted later and offline or after the website has gone. Whether that’s just saving “everything” it needs to recreate the machine state, or by saving only the machine state itself.
That doesn’t mean the whole website will remain interactive but it will at the very least preserve what was inside the scroll buffer of the browser
And that is a LOT better than just saving a broken link, or just saving a scrolling screenshot, which already would be an improvement over the current state of things.
It would also allow a text search of the page content of all bookmarked pages. Which would be huge since the current bookmark manager can barely search titles and very poorly at that.
The bookmarks system is long LONG due for a full overhaul
This “machine state” definition and manipulation is exactly the hard part of the concept. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a beast of a problem.
Our best current solutions are just dumb web crawler bots.
To me a simple page saving (ctrl+s) integration seems like a most realistic solution.
I mean the engine already has a full machine state. I could just run firefox inside a VM and snapshot the VM to save the website in a idle-disconnected state. So it’s a matter of doing something more sane and efficient than this
Now imagine having google, bing, qwant, duck duck go and ecosia bookmarked.
You’d get a mostly empty page with a search box in the middle … and a few hundred megs of tracking software.
Mozilla! Stop doing stupid stuff!
Good, they should exclusively focus on Firefox.
And how they can monetize user data?
They’re going to do that regardless.
Good.
Pocket was actually useful. To sent web content to my e reader…
My Kobo has the Pocket app and I’ll miss being able to send articles to it. Apparently I’ll be one of the few to be sad to see Pocket go.
There are dozens of us!
Somebody suggested Wallabag which can also be self-hosted and is available on Kobo.
I found these instructions on how to install KoReader and use Wallabag. It looks like a real pain in the ass. I hope Rakuten does something, because I’m not doing that unless I absolutely have to.
You could consider sending feedback to kobo devs. They could make the install process simpler.
I just saw a thread about Digg buying Pocket from Mozilla, so I don’t think I’ll need to mess with that now.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Bummer. I can see pocket going, I tried to use it but it’s basically a place to put stuff that you plant to but never actually get around to reading, a bookmark does the same thing. Fakespot I’m not sure about. I’ve used it, but there’s no way to verify how right it is.
Switched to LibreWolf after seeing the message about Fakespot. It was a heavily used browser add-on I used almost religiously since 2020. Mozilla acquired them in 2023 and then did nothing with it, letting it die. I’m so tired of this bullshit.
Is it free software?
Then anyone can make the improvements they want for it.
Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.
To be fair, I think they both existed as separate products first, before Mozilla bought them. I used both, but they should have never been integrated as a part of a browser…
Welp, I’ve taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.
pocket I never used. I found it ugly and just s violation of privacy as it moved a service that should be local only, to external webservers. I can see why it’s finally had the plug pulled
It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.
Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.
Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.
the main thing with pocket and services like it is that it saves and syncs entire pages. like a local internet archive.
Mozilla should fire their non-technical staff, strongly make the case for how they’re fighting for a free and open internet, and use a subscription model for Firefox to pay the bills
Nobody is paying a subscription to use a browser they can get for free.
Patreon and Wikipedia are things people pay for that they can get for free. I have long wanted a way to directly find Firefox development and sustainability.
Wikipedia has a far wider reach, doesn’t have competitors in quite the same way Mozilla does, and needs far less money than Mozilla.
It takes hundreds of millions every year to maintain a modern web engine, have top-tier security, etc. It’s harder than maintaining an OS, even.
I just don’t see enough people getting in on that.
You mention Patreon. Alright, let’s go with that. The largest Patreon project by far earns less than $3m per year. Mozilla would need probably 150x that.
Enough internet users are familiar with the adage “if a product is free, you are the product”, through personal experience
I’d be OK with paying for Firefox if it meant that it was stripped of all association with advertisers. And presumably, if Mozilla were freed from that association, they’d be able to make a stronger case for how they’re protecting a free internet
Maybe you would. The vast vast majority wouldn’t.
Not many people care about privacy from big tech, and those that do probably know what FOSS is and would know that they can trivially get Firefox for free.
I also doubt that Mozilla could get the hundreds of millions per year that they need to maintain a modern web browser engine, keep up to date on security, etc.
This story marks the loss of another revenue stream for Mozilla. Their business is increasingly reliant on Google’s search deal for money, and if that money stops, they’ll have to face that same reckoning. For example, they won’t be able to afford paying their CEO millions of dollars a year any more.
I think they should start repositioning themselves now as an activist organisation that is fighting corporate interests trying to control the internet. If they can do that, I think a lot of people would pay to use Firefox
funny. if you point out what sucks about moz before they tell it to their fanbase you’re banned. but after moz announced it everbody goes like yeah good decision. the user/fan base has become the top reason to not use FF.
Thx for this.
Also, shout-out to https://karakeep.app/ (formerly “Hoarder”)
Thank you! Guess I’ll be trying something new.
Thanks - added to Pocket to read it later.
