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.
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.
Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).
Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.
> having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk
the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy!
I think it's more easily explained by incompetence. Esp. when stop words like 'of' and 'the' are somehow included in the index. These are almost trivial to remove prior to indexing (any decent indexing library, such as lucene, would have a prepared list of stop words filter, and it's not like you even need to do any work to have it!).
> the risk should've been the same with google's index, and yet they're dandy!
Sure it should be but reality says Google has many more and probably better lawyers so the risk is clearly different.
IMO search is garbage in all Mozilla products.
E.g. Thunderbird ignores potential matches in quoted mail text. That's utterly useless if one remembers a certain mentioning by the other side. Plus, now and then repairing the index suddenly leads to matches -- when is the right time to repair? I don't now -> always if it's seriously important...
Is something like Apache Solr (a search index) well suited for something like this?
I've deployed and used it at work for searching specific, well-specified bits of information, but I don't know how well it would work on large chunks of text like articles etc; I assume this is its real purpose and it should fit, but I'm guessing.
Just pgsql is enough. Even a chache db or sqlite do full text search
I'm not familiar with the various search features of different databases.
Do they offer things like the phonetic search that Solr does?
With Solr you can search a noun for example even if you only know how to say it and not how to spell it.
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.
Best alt other than perch? For whatever reason I can’t get it to show up in the share/send menu on iOS and doesn’t seem to have a browser extension.
How do you send articles to it?
Maybe https://pinboard.in? I haven't used it, but it tempts me a few times per decade.
it's very good because it's simple and hasn't changed in over 10 years. you know it won't change, and it's the best $6.28 I've ever invested (but of course, I wouldn't pay for it every year; I would find another solution).
I recently started using wallabag. Seems to do the job decently
I'm glad people are mentioning Wallabag. It's open source and self-hostable, so it's not as likely to disappear on you. If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...
I've run Wallabag before but stopped around the time my son was born so I'd have more time to take care of him. And... I switched to Pocket. Oh well! I guess I'll switch back now, probably for good.
What's your other theory? ;-)
+1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)
I’m curious: with that many saves, what were you main reasons for using Pocket? Did you glean info at scale or is it just the case that you saved so much, read some subset, and it grew over time?
The initial idea was nice: do not lose what you want to read later (the list), keep a list of what you read (archive). Then it became better with “Permanent copies”: never lose content you want to read again later.
That number is a combination of all three, plus more than a decade of active use.
Damn, any alternatives in mind for that workflow?
My killer feature that led me to start using Pocket was Kobo integration: I could hit a button on my computer and continue reading an article on my ereader, duly cleaned up.
I used to use Rain.drop, not the same a pocket, but similar. I imported the data into Obsidian and I now use that for information I want to save online using the clipper plugin. It's changed my life. If you like customizing the searchability and displaying content from saved pages, is the best IMHO.
Rain.drop is Russian, isn't it?
The maintainer of Raindrop is from Kazakhstan
What was the theory!!! I had to read your comment twice looking for it, only to realize that there was no theory in there!
I think it was that people stopped using Pocket because the search was so bad.
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.
Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.
That makes me very angry. I am fat, wasteful, and directionless but Google pays me nothing.
As the guy from whose line said: You don't need a million dollars to do nothing. Look at my cousin. He’s broke and he doesn’t do shit.
I think you mixed up Ryan Stiles and Diedrich Bader, though now I wonder if Diedrich ever went on Whose Line when Drew Carey was hosting.
Is Google your default search engine? If so, you should send them an invoice. :)
So in market terms, you are infinitely more efficient!
I also hope that Google stops paying Apple $20B/yr for the same reason. The effect on the stock market due to a sudden reduction in Apple services revenue will be fun to watch.
As I understand it, Google pay for the searches passed on by the browser. So as long as they have users, they’ll get paid.
The DoJ is arguing in court that Google should be barred from paying off Mozilla because of Google's search monopoly
https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
That's so hilariously backwards.
Google should be split into several business units [1], should be forced to give up Chrome [2], and should be forced to invest several billion of its war chest into competitors.
That's what the DOJ would do if it still had balls.
The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane. It's absolutely bonkers. There is so much value in it, yet everybody's favorite mega monopoly is pouring value into commoditizing everything to keep eyeballs and attention and dollars and a taxation regime the size of a medium-sized country in its gravitational singularity.
Google is an invasive species in every market. We need the EU/DOJ/BRICS equivalent of Chicxulub-level regulation to end its throat-grip predation on everyone.
[1] Six "Baby Bells", or "Tiny Googs": Search, Android, Deepmind, Cloud, YouTube, Ads. Shuffle everything else into another bin or spin it off independently. Waymo, etc.
[2] You could put Google with the Ads business as there is (1) no synergy between Chrome<->Android<->Search anymore, and (2) if Ads fucks it up, it doesn't kill the broader browser market or web ecosystem.
What's bonkers to me is that people are alway complaining about ads and they're not putting "delete web ads from your life" front and center of their value proposition. Go to firefox.com and look at the the "why Firefox" copy. It's could be about basically any modern browser. It's like selling a car with "it has wheels!".
I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.
I bought a car a couple years ago. It advertised am/fm radio in the feature sheet
I read the parent post as meaning 'wheels!' being front and centre of the brochure.
> The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane.
What do you mean? There's a huge amount of money, via getting paid to route people to a search engine.
as I have understood there is also talk of forcing them to sell of Chrome - but
https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/is_chrome_even_a_sellable...
BRICS is a cancer on par with Google.
I won't argue on this as it's orthogonal.
Sovereignty of your country's smaller businesses over monopolies, and sovereignty over data and data privacy is paramount.
Every country should be trying to tear Google apart. It isn't just too big, it's a black hole that is eviscerating competition.
The US, Canada, all of the members of the EU, India, and even our geopolitical rivals should be trying to regulate and/or break up Google.
India won't. The call of the hour is re-industrialization, and manufacturing Pixel phones is one piece of that puzzle. Give employment to millions of people is far more important in the short run. And there are other ways of enforcing sovereignty.
I’ve got job alerts, and it looks like they are going all in on VPN services given how many people they want to hire… yet I don’t know a single person who would use Mozilla’s VPN service let alone pay for it.
Does anyone know if Mozilla has built up an endowment/trust fund type thing that will allow them to operate without further revenue from an entity like Google?
Last I checked they have some money from the Yahoo settlement. But nowhere near something they can use to operate in perpetuity.
> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
As someone who grew up on Netscape Navigator, the current situation gives me flashback to how Netscape had to die so Mozilla could be born...
I mean… Phoenix was the original code name for Firefox, so maybe it was just foreshadowing.
I'm curious what the governance structure of Mozilla is that keeps things this way. People have been upset for quite a while at the direction Mozilla is going in, yet there seems to be no coalition to oust the current leadership. Is this impossible for some reason?
The leadership has been ousted.
> This includes major growth in our Boards, with 40% new Board members since we began our efforts to evolve and grow back in 2022. We’ve also been bringing in new executive talent, including a new MoFo Executive Director and a Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. By the end of the year, we hope to have new, permanent CEOs for both MoCo and Mozilla.ai... With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
It's good to know they have brought in new talents.
Note that Mozilla Corporations, Mozilla Ventures, and Mozilla.ai mentioned in the articles are all subsidiaries of Mozilla Foundation. If there are issues with the subsidaries' leadership, they could be easily removed by the foundation. If there are issue with Mozilla foundation's leadership then, according to the bylaws, it's not possible for the foundation's board to be removed unless they self remove.
Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.
Section 3.5 Removal. Any director may be removed from office, with or without cause, by the vote of a majority of the other directors then in office.
https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pd...
>Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.
The board of directors elects themselves? That is dumb
That doesn't sound like she and her fattened board were ousted at all.
I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.
To help highlight where there are changes and where there is continuity at the top level, here's a table of who was the MoCo CEO, MoCo and MoFo Board Chairs, MoFO President, and MoFo ED over time for the last ten years.
Surman same problematic "leadership" type.
There is no way for anyone to get Mozilla to change because the current board picks new board members.
I switched to Vivaldi after 23 years of Mozilla. Could not be happier.
Another Vivaldi user here, who "grew up" with the old pre-Chinese Opera...
Sadly Vivaldi is also dependent on Chromium, and will also have to lose Manifest v2 support when that time comes.
All my hopes are with Ladybird now
My hopes are with Servo, I like the novelty of it being implemented in Rust rather than C/C++.
I follow Ladybird and appreciate their work. Especially implementing everything from standards, fixing standards and keeping it easy to follow the standards in code (and I'm proud Andreas is Swedish too).
But for something with the surface area of "everything you can do with a computer and it's uncle" a memory safe language feels like the right choice.
Just a knee-jerk opinion since I'm not a browser dev and existing sandboxing seems to work well enough, but an opinion nonetheless.
Ladybird is moving to Swift IIRC?
I believe you are correct: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
I’m not super familiar with Servo; I’d heard of the Mozilla layoffs but hadn’t followed the work. I believe I can now split my hopes between the Ladybird and Servo; thank you!
> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
The day that happens, the only thing we are left with is Chrome..
Mozilla ≠ firefox
Who is going to fund Firefox if not Mozilla? Maybe a new organization can pop up or maybe a new one won't.
Many corporations won't want to fund something that's privacy oriented when they make money on using or selling personal data. Maybe security or privacy oriented corporations will step up with money or labor.
And Thunderbird?
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.
How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.
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.
Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.
It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit
Thank you!
Novo Norodisk has a similar corporate structure, being owned majority by the Novodisk Foundation[0]
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/novo-nordisks-unique-structur...
It's a "we want to sell something, but non-profits aren't allowed to do that" trick. And it means the for-profit subsidiary has to pay normal taxes.
OpenAI is structured the same way, so they can sell access to their models. At least until it switches to being entirely for-profit, if that is allowed to happen.
Last time I heard, Thunderbird has zero people on it for years but eventually they manage to afford to pay someone part time to work on it :smh:
Thunderbird is quite healthy and received $8.6M in donations in 2023[0] which is used to employ 24 people[1].
Unlike Firefox, donations are used to fund development.
[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...
[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
I guess what we need is a non-profit fork of Firefox that takes donations directly and focuses only on the browser.
To be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised. Thanks for the info.
I did change quite significantly in recent times, so there is certainly work done.
On the other hand it is a mail client and it does exactly what it is supposed to do for years on end. And I believe it is the best mail client too.
mozilla has been broken for a long time. spiritually and intellectually, brave is the successor
Brave is adware, in what way is it the spiritual successor to Firefox?
An ad-ware reskin of chromium is the successor of Firefox?
Sorry, but I'm not going to trust any browser based on Chrome. Even Brave.
It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2 as Google has every interest to kill it completely.
> It's not long until Brave won't be able to support Manifest V2
That's true but not that big of a deal in their case. The built-in ad blocker works quite well and removes the need to run uBlock Origin.
From what I understand, Brave is a shit-show in its' own right.
I use Brave and it's totally fine. People love to complain about it on HN but I have never had any bad experiences.
> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.
Ugh. This sounds so horrible, but this is probably the truest statement on this entire page.
What's even more wild is that many users, even on HN, don't seem to pick up on the fact that the alternatives to Firefox are either Chrome or Chrome in different colored trenchcoats. Firefox is like the last bastion of user choice when it comes to deciding how we interact with the Internet, a choice that has been subtly but steadily stripped from us for years.
My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way Chrome is? While I stand fast on the ground that Google wants to monopolize our web experience, it really seems like the community at large is just...letting it happen. The only strong contender that I've seen built from FF is Iceweasel/cat which works fine for my needs, but is definitely not winning any popularity contests despite actively knocking out those non-free parts of FF.
> why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way chromium is?
Ease of integration. It's impossible to integrate Firefox compared to chromium. Unless this is solved, Firefox will die. The hope is new engines like Servo (maybe ladybird), where they are actually putting time and resources to make it easy to integrate. I'll never switch to chromiumia, but as soon as one of those new engines is mature enough, I'm definitely dropping Firefox.
> My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way Chrome is?
I actually looked into this. Say you consider yourself as part of the FOSS community, and want to build a new browser, and you start to look for your options. The only things readily available as libraries are webkit (currently owned and open sourced by Apple) and webkit-gtk (based on the former). Apple is like Apple and doesn't really want you to use their open source lib, so even though webkit-gtk team made it happen anyway, good luck if you want to do it yourself. If you decide to just use webkit-gtk, you've made a decision similar to lots of other members of the FOSS community in this area (luakit, the Rust webview crate, etc.). Another option is Qt WebEngine. It's based on Chromium. It's part of the Qt ecosystem and though I think you can use it as a standalone library, carving it out still requires some engineering. So these are the options that are available as libraries. And where are the Firefox ones? Servo makes it clear at the beginning of The Servo Book that it isn't available as a library yet. And Gecko? Firefox source doesn't even include a directory named gecko. It's so tightly coupled with the other parts that you'll need a lot of engineering to carve it out. And this is in contrast to Blink, the engine of Chromium, which is nicely placed in its own directory, having its own webpage with some learning resources.
Look into what the Mozilla foundation actually spends its money on and the exec salaries, developer layoffs and then compare that to Firefox development over the past 5 years.
It’s getting harder and harder to find examples of this non-profit structure in tech that actually serve the software they claim to.
> 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.
they really went out of their way to include as many "Why" sections and links as possible without saying a single word about why.
the internet is no longer designed to be readable.
it is designed to be profitable.
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.
Its also no longer designed for users, but for the advertisers and bots.
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.
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.
> 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?
> Or is Firefox trailing even mobile Safari here?
Short answer: yes.
Here are some web platform features Chrome and Safari (desktop and mobile) are shipping but not Firefox:
* Container Style queries: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* @scope: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* Picture in Picture: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* View Transitions: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
* Cross-document view transitions: https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/feat...
I'm not a developer, so maybe I misunderstand what PiP is strictly speaking. But, I thought I had been using PiP for a couple of years now in Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-f...
Is this not PiP?
According to caniuse, it's a proprietary implementation that's only partially implemented [1].
WebKit, which powers Safari on all its platforms has been ahead of Firefox on a number of features.
For example, the WebKit team shipped :has() in March 2022. Chrome shipped in August of that year and Firefox even later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33646121
Ever since Microsoft announced Edge was going to use Chromium, I've been wondering why Firefox doesn't do the same. By adopting the same renderer as everyone else, consumers get a consistent rendering experience and Firefox devs can focus on the features that keep us using Firefox.
How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?
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.
> For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When it's gone, there will basically be only one left.
Safari's iOS/iPadOS global marketshare is about 33%; it's on 2+ billion devices. Definitely not going anywhere [1].
> Definitely not going anywhere
Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps. They have every interest in getting that App Store cut, and none in extending the web with open, competing technologies. (* Maybe the recent app store legal rulings ill change things, we'll see.)
> Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps.
Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?
There's no evidence of WebKit languishing. If anything, the WebKit team has shipped important web platform features more quickly than it ever has before.
WebKit is arguably the most important framework for the App Store; many thousands of apps rely on it, including many of Apple's first party apps.
* first to ship <search> in Safari 17, September 2023
* first to ship :has in Safari 15.4, March 2022 [1]
* first to ship wide gamut color support [2]
* the only browser shipping support for JPEG XL
* so many new features shipped in Safari 18.4 it took 8,000 words to describe it all [3]
[1]: https://www.webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/
[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...
[3]: https://webkit.org/blog/16574/webkit-features-in-safari-18-4...
what about things like the browser object in Qt/PyQt?
Have you forgotten Apple and WebKit?
Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?
> Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?
Yes… 12 years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl...
They are quite different now.
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.
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.
It's owned by a chinese company and uses Chromium
For users it’s called “putting all your eggs in one basket”
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.
Ah, Firefox, the overly attached browser: https://bug1791524.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9295...
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?
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...
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... and https://github.com/sdegutis/os.90s.dev/blob/main/site/sw.ts#... )
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
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
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.
> 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.
> every other browser
You can just say Chromium
Safari exists, and is quite popular.
Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform.
Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge.
That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do.
Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike, which is a real shame, but I know it would have significantly boosted usage numbers of Firefox and its engine, which in turn would drive more investment into Firefox itself.
This has always been an issue with Gecko and the Mozilla codebase. It was a massive blow to the Mozilla community when Safari was released using KHTML instead of Gecko. Google then adopted WebKit (itself an evolution of KHTML) for Chrome, another slight for Mozilla. This despite prominent ex Mozilla developers like Lisa Melton, David Hyatt, Ben Goodger, and others being involved early on with Safari and Chrome development. Even Brendan Eich went with Chromium and not Mozilla technology for Brave.
I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.
Microsoft was (and is) interested in Electron. They used it for lots of stuff like MS Teams (which is now using their WebView2 control), VSCode, Outlook, and their Graph toolkit.
Outlook is Electron slop now? Jesus christ.
It's so fantastic that it can't even open Outlook .msg files. It boggles the mind
> Microsoft Edge went from a pretty good browser to loaded with of things I dislike
Yep. It was great. Now it's a kitchen sink with everything thrown into it and it's disgusting.
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.
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.
I don't think people even think about downloading browsers, swear the overwhelming majority of my irl friends only uses the default one on whatever phone, with rare exceptions.
I agree. To a large extent, the only people you'll see putting Chrome on their iPhones are the people who are cross platform on their laptops.
Microsoft's goal was to make sure the browser didn't obviate Windows.
Google's goal is to push ads and you can see that with everything their doing. Manifest v3 castrates adblockers and their attempts to remove 3rd party cookies would stifle any competition in adtech.
>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.
> 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-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )
> Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.
Electron apps have no stake nor impact of any kind in the results of browser market share. None.
Indeed, shipping Chrome alongside each application, because developers couldn't be bothered to write cross-platform Web code for OS Web widgets or the users system browser doesn't have nothing to do with it.
None at all, those poor devs, write portable Web code is so hard.
In my experience, Safari has been the slowest to implement useful new standards and is the least transparent about bugs and development plans, so it's very hard to act like they're doing us a favor by preventing better and more open browsers from having more marketshare.
Welcome to open standards.
Same happens across OpenGroup, Khronos and ISO standards in the industry.
Apparently what is so great about them, is too much work in what concerns doing the latest shinny thing on the Web.
Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.
> Safari only exist on Apple devices
Webkit, at least, builds on a lot more platforms than you think. Take a look at https://build.webkit.org/#/builders
I'm seeing at least three other MAJOR platforms:
• GTK-Linux-64-bit-Release-Build • PlayStation-Release-Build • Windows-64-bit-Release-BuildAnd just a tip, if you don't have any Apple devices but need to test a bug/inconsistency being reported by Safari users, you can usually use GNOME Web (Epiphany) and the same behavior will usually manifest, since it is a true Webkit browser. It also includes the Web Inspector with the exact same interface as Safari. And it's not super outdated or anything like that, it tracks Webkit quite well nowadays.
It's a bit ironic that Webkit started as KHTML, a component of KDE, but eventually made its way to GNOME when a Gecko-based Epiphany became hard to maintain.
WebKit 100% exists on Windows and Linux, Microsoft builds it under the playwright project.
I use it occasionally, only for debugging purposes though.
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?
I used a really low-end system for a while some time back, running Linux, and WebKit-based browsers were the only ones with a mainstream (so: actually renders correctly for practically all sites) engine that was usable with even one tab open (I could do 2-3 as long as none of the pages were “webapps”)
This indicates some kind of fundamentally better design, to me. Probably related to why Safari’s by far the most respectful to battery life, of the big three browsers.
Devs like WebKit because it's easy to integrate in non-browsers.
Like for desktop apps? I guess this differs fundamentally from Chromium in that... you do not run the "entire" browser like in Electron?
I thought that electron == chrome
...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.
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
It was officially announced late February/early March I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073
However, WebKit exists elsewhere.
On mobile, I somewhat like Sleipnir browser for various configurable UI niceties unrelated to WebKit. I like the way it displays tabs as a scrolling strip of buttons, instead of making me open a "manage tabs" UI.
I configured a different user-agent string[1] to make some sites happy or to get some sites to neither force a dumbed-down "mobile view" nor spam demands that I use their mobile apps.
It has a small selection of plugins/extensions, mostly written by users.
Occasionally, a captcha will get stuck in a loop, so I'll have to try Opera[2] or Firefox. Or a Google site will sometimes refuse logins.
. o O ( I don't bother with Sleipnir on desktop, because it's buggy, quixotic, and nothing like the mobile version. )
[1] There's an optional UI button for switching UA string among Sleipnir's desktop or mobile ones, or your own custom string.
[2] The only mobile browser I've tried that can always convince a site to load is desktop view. Some Google sites try Very HardTM to force a mobile experience.
Sure, but fewer (sic) features is mostly a better state of affairs, and apple devices are mostly what matter if you're catering to rich westerners (as most products on this forum try to do).
To me, chromium only matters so much as I am forced to care by being employed. It offers very little to me outside of being necessary to enable the "blur" background on my video chats and offers a very shitty corporate UX.
you can blur the background now at OS level on macOS from the menu bar.
Going purely by (mis)feature count, I'd say they're pretty similar:
https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+136,safari+18.5,firefox+...
WebKit also exists on Linux, albeit not as good as on Darwin.
Not sure how this contradicts the fact that Safari is quite popular.
Apple devices make up over half of all visitors in some markets/segments.
Update: Downvoted for facts, stay classy, HN!
So what? For many people, having to buy new hardware to use it means it isn't a viable alternative browser.
My point was more that it's hard to ignore as a publisher due to its user base, less that it's a viable alternative as a user.
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.
I was curious what "view transitions" are even about: 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.
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.
I was a user for so long I used to call this app instapaper.
same here! we're dating ourselves... xD
That was when del.icio.us was still alive
Mozilla appears to be retirement fund for incompetent CxOs...
> …that are available in every other browser
where “every other browser” == Chrome.
Otherwise, agreed.
"Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise" Indeed every stable software provider.
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.
> I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration
And blockchain integration after that.
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.
> 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.
If you look at their finances you will realize that there is nothing left in that company.
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.
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.
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)
I loved Pocket. I used it nearly daily. I was often in their top n% of users. I paid for it. Then one day they changed the way their rendering worked on iOS. And it destroyed my workflow.
I also bought a Kobo E-Reader specifically to use Pocket with it. In short order I found an open-source alternative - Omnivore - and spent my time hacking away at my Kobo to get it to pull from there instead. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
I think Pocket was amazing. I think the idea worked amazingly for someone like me, who is an enjoyer of reading, but had a hard time finding a moment to sit down and do it.
I am upset that Pocket is going. I am upset that Omnivore shut down. I am upset that my Kobo will probably remove that integration and thus ruin my Self-Hosted Omnivore's integration with it.
I think it could have been a lot, lot more.
I bought an Amazon Fire tablet exclusively for Pocket use as well.
Something did change maybe about year and a half ago about rendering articles. It felt like less and less of them were rendering in article mode, and I needed wifi access to read articles in the original format. Before that practically everything rendered in article mode, afterwards I would say it was about 50%.
yeahs, the offline caching got terrible. its text that (rarely) changes. I have no idea why the mobile app couldn't just remember what each url was, even if it was 6 weeks stale.
Also, Pocket couldn't create reader views for many websites (like hacker news discussions), which means the TTS was useless.
Oh and the TTS required an internet connection.
That's so unfortunate--I've also used Pocket for a decade+. I had the Omnivore app installed on my phone as a replacement for the other infinite feed scrolling apps.
I'm actually working on an open-source alternative at https://curi.ooo if you're interested in checking it out. It's a work in progress, but I'm building it primarily for my own use because I'm frustrated with all these services shutting down.
The Kobo integration you have is interesting too, wonder how I could support that use case...
I love how clean it is!
One personal use case that I'd love to see supported (when you get your mobile apps implemented) is the ability to add articles via the 'share' shortcuts. I get mailing lists with links, and I don't want to stop to read an article while clearing out my inbox. So if a link looks interesting, I use the 'share' feature to add it to Pocket, and then I'll go back to it later -- without opening my browser.
Yes, great suggestion. It's currently implemented in the beta Android app, just need to get registered with the Apple Developer Program and get iOS working.
Because Curio saves client-side, it opens the app and renders the page briefly though. Not sure yet if there's a better way to do it.
That's great! I've been looking for something for a while. Great features from my point of view:
- email newsletters, especially with offline mails (no remote images) since theya can go easily through workplace gateyways for those of us who work in secure areas. Didn't see yet if yours were.
- sync and integrate with everything, e-readers, nextcloud, browsers...
- PWA
Good luck!
As someone who self-hosts and who used the Pocket+Kobo integration _and_ who hacks away at their Kobo, hopefully folks like you and I can help keep the integration alive.
I already try to prevent the Kobo from upgrading due to unwanted changes to my Kobo patch configuration, so I'm crossing my fingers here.
I'm in a similar spot: whenever I browse an article that could be better suited for the Kobo (i.e. admiral cloudberg), I send it to pocket. Right now I don't know how to replace it, because AFAIK Kobo don't allow to install anything similar.
This was one of my considerations when I chose Kobo over Kindle. Very unfortunate, indeed.
I'm with you, I use Pocket all the time on my Kobo as well - I need to cobble together some self-hosted alternative. Did you find another alternative besides Omnivore?
I still use the self-hosted version of Omnivore - I had built quite a lot around it so when that shut down I just decided to transfer over.
It was hard enough going from Pocket to something else, I didn't want to do that again.
I actually have a Supernote now, and side-loaded the Omnivore App onto it - so I use my Kobo less (though still somewhat at night due to the backlight.)
Yay another Supernote fan! Love that device.
Reading pro-Pocket comments is so surreal.
I never really paid any attention to Pocket and never used it but 100% of the comments I ever saw were about how it was some invasion of privacy tool that was evidence of corruption in Mozilla selling your data to 3rd parties or something.
Now it's dead and ... everyone here is mourning its passing. Guess I was a successful mark for anti-Mozilla FUD tactics.
I don't think anyone was opposed to Pocket-the-product, but its integration into Firefox.
I used it long before Mozilla purchased it and continued to use it for years after, but jumped ship because years went by without any updates to the product. IIRC it hasn't received a single update between approximately 2019 and 2021. It felt abandoned long before today.
I used Pocket since it was called Read-it-Later back in 2011/2010. It was one of the first things I'd install onto every device I owned.
I used it until their dreadful redesign in 2023.
I got a _lot_ of use out of Pocket.
I've also used it for several years, but it really was never great compared to anything else in this space and seemingly stopped any feature development years ago.
The biggest problem for me was that they just completely gave up on paywalls, at a time when viable workarounds finally became widely available (e.g. iOS share sheet extensions being able to inject JavaScript into Safari to collect the content, which is what many alternatives do). Completely useless for reading paid news.
I loved it when it was called read-it-later and was a standalone add-on. Requiring a Mozilla account made me stop using it.
My feelings are 30% annoyed (because I still have some data in there), 70% hopeful that a thoroughly mediocre contender is going a way and some more consolidation in this market might finally create critical mass for and focus on some open-source, data-exportable solution in the way Omnivore unfortunately couldn't.
Another long-time Kobo user here. I hadn't even heard of Pocket before I bought an Aura One, but it quickly became my preferred way to copy miscellaneous content from PC to the reader.
It's ironic that the device that is supposed to facilitate reading(e readers) makes it so hard to read articles from the web.
I feel like there should be an easy and common file transfer protocol, like a more straightforward bittorrent,FTP,MTP to exchange with these devices.
I'm looking into setting up Wallabag for myself, maybe it could work for you too? https://wallabag.org/
Related bit from my other comment:
> If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...
https://omnivore.app is down. Hug of death perhaps?
https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/omnivore.app.html says down for more than a week.
as mentioned in the parent comment, omnivore shut down.
Check the barebones but functional Wallabag. Hosted version available for a fee.
Related bit from my other comment:
> If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...
Wallabag looks great, if a little homebrew. I signed up and had to laugh that the default "Welcome to wallabag" article could not be retrieved. Regardless, I decided to give 'em 12 bucks and see how it goes.
Just to add that you can also self-host it, and it supports Kobo as well. I once stumbled upon but didn't investigate further since Pocket just worked so well. I guess now I will have to.
It’s the lack of nice sync to an articles directory that’ll be missed. I’m also bitten by this shutdown.
Sad to see Fakespot shutdown after purchase. I rely on Fakespot for a sort of ground-truth when navigating Amazon. When faced with 20 similar items, all having thousands of faked review scores, it was helpful to get the A-F rating. While these tools didn't really need to live in the browser, by purchasing and then killing them, they've done the web a disservice.
"Fakespot's analysis of online shopping reviews didn't fit a model we could sustain"
I feel like you figure that out before you purchase the largest tool for analyzing and detecting fake product reviews.
Yes, losing Fakespot is brutal! Will Mozilla consider open-sourcing it? Then someone who cares can pickup the torch.
This New "AdLand" Mozilla is way << worse than << Old Moz.
To Amazon's credit, at least now they do surface some junky items as"Frequently Returned", which I've found very useful to differentiate between and avoid the worst trash clones.
You know how it goes, embrace, extend, extinguish isn't just for MS anymore. I'm in your shoes here, Fakespot is really useful on Amazon when it warns you about a seller having problems for example.
One thing that unfortunately never got properly announced, is that over time Pocket was slowly open sourced piece-by-piece, mostly as it got rewritten/modernised, as I understand it: https://github.com/Pocket/
I guess the fact that it wasn't a big bang source code dump made it hard to make a moment of it.
(Note: open-source does not necessarily mean that it was optimised for self-hosting, which would've been a lot more work, of course.)
Kind of a bit "too little too late" when they're still open-sourcing it but by bit in 2025 after promising to open-source it during the acquisition in 2017. I'm not very impressed.
It wasn't started in 2025, it's a process that's been going on for years. (Presumably, but I don't actually have more information here, the pre-acquisition codebase couldn't easily be open sourced without rewriting for legal reasons, e.g. copyright residing with someone else.)
Nothing about the communication at the time indicated that publishing the source code would happen gradually over a decade. For all intents and purposes, what was promised was that it would be open source within some reasonably short time frame.
Having worked on a similar endeavor, I doubt they intentionally dragged their feet on it. They likely had a smorgasbord of legal bullshit and technical challenges resulting from code omissions mandated by said legal bullshit that they had to muddle through.
I don't care. Don't promise to do something like that if you can't follow through. Nobody forced them to promise to open source Pocket (although that promise certainly helped the bad PR of integrating a closed source service into Firefox!).
How common is it for a SaaS company that isn't an old-enterprisey type to use third-party proprietary code in their business logic? I associated that phenomenon much more with standard installable PC software, especially the type to use specialized workflows for non-standard stuff, not a web service, much less something like this.
> Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links. Additionally, the export does not contain tags or highlights.
boo! without the tags, the links will be mostly useless for me. Every now and then I thought aboyt switching to some self-hosted solution. Should've done it sooner... and I will never trust Mozilla with any service again.
You can connect Pocket to Readwise Reader ( readwise.io/reader ), via Pocket's API, which will let Reader view all the tags, metadata, highlights, etc.
Even if you didn't want to use Reader, you could then export from inside Reader and Readwise to pull out CSVs of all of your articles+highlights -- no subscription required.
(full disclosure: founder of Readwise here, obviously if you want to try our Reader app that would be sweet, but at least wanted to offer this way to get a more complete export)
So your app will also import the archived copies from Pocket? It's mainly about importing archived content from links that might now be dead.
No, unfortunately their API doesn't return the actual html content of the saved articles :( just the urls and all the metadata: highlights, title, author, image, tags, location, etc
I really wish they did :/ some things aren't even on the internet archive and are probably saved uniquely on Pocket's servers. Would be sweet if they could open source that data.
Would be awesome if your app could scrape the actual pocket pages.
I'd sign up for a paid version of yours if it had that feature. But I'm not sure how many others premium users would do the same.
something these other apps could do is run dead URLs through archive.org and nab it that way.
Not 100% foolproof but I'm willing to bet it will work for the majority of links
Love your app. Any plans to enable reading of Readwise Reader articles on eReaders like Kobo? I’m thinking of something akin to how Pocket’s integration with Kobo.
Thanks! Kobo is hard because it's proprietary software, but we would like to...
However, there is a wide range of eink devices that already exist that run Android (check out Boox, Meebook, Daylight, though there are many others) -- we've optimized Reader to run great on these devices :)
seems to work better with https://fabiensanglard.net/rss.xml than most readers although it still gets 403s fetching images but I'll still give it a run to see how it works for me.
I think the image urls provided in the RSS feed are just broken, eg this one is linked in the latest article:
Thanks. Will try. Currently Pocket seems to be overloaded, but hopefully it recovers in the 30 trial days.
While your app seems nice on first glance the 10$ a month is not a small amount for non americans. 10$ a year I could stomach.
Cool! The import should auto-retry, but in case something gets snagged there you can also always do `cmd+k -> pocket` to retrigger a full import.
Totally hear you on price.. Reader is built for people who spend a lot of time reading and can justify it (and the sub also comes with access to our Readwise product too).
We also have a 50% off discount for students as well folks in countries with depressed currencies (eg India, South American countries, etc) which might help.
We try our best, but are also bootstrapped and have to charge enough to keep the company sustainable!
I can't even connect to Pocket.
Not to mention they charged $45 a year for a service that included backups in their cloud should your save become a dead link. Imagine paying that amount for several years and when you need it they pull the rug.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250321050043/https://getpocket...
On that archived page: "A forever home for your collection"
Forever just doesn't mean what it used to.
SaaS rots faster than the bits on your spinning rust. The incentive structure tends to drift away from a corp's long-term strategy. If you don't own it, you don't own it.
Even the bits you own rot faster than brick and mortar. It's just the nature of the universe - cosmic rays, magnetosphere, etc. Doesn't help that the integrated circuits are smaller, and hence much more brittle with each generation.
And do you even own the hardware you purchased? Even before the ongoing craze to turn fridges into subscriptions into landfill. Try some "retro" devices from 15, 20, 30y ago - many builtin websites/apps/services just 404, long before companies planned for obsolescence.
Only diamonds are forever.
Like when people assume a "lifetime guarantee" is for the lifetime of themselves. More correctly it means for the lifetime of the company or the product support cycle.
Yeah this is really lame. I used it because I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands.
I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction, but I think it's a shame to lose Pocket. I really like several Mozilla services (Relay, VPN, and up to now Pocket) and this shutdown along with such a half-assed export option is a real disappointment.
I'm with you. I think it's great that Mozilla is trying/tried to extend their value beyond just the browser.
I found pocket immensely useful. Having the ability to have my kobo e-reader sync pocket articles to read off-line was such a useful feature.
I don't understand the Mozilla hate on this board. I think it's wildly overblown.
You’re misunderstanding; much of the so called hate is rather intense disappointment many tech people have with Mozilla due to mismanagement and constant fumbles. Intense disappointment about a future we’ll never get to experience where Mozilla is well run and produces and iterates effectively on big open source projects, bolsters browser ecosystem competition and fends off browser monopoly (requires market share which they’ve failed at), etc. Don’t conflate that with hate, many of us are still their biggest proponents despite often engaging in criticism. If you stop seeing a lot of Mozilla “hate” that would probably be worse and then you’d really know that nobody cares about them at all and they’re actually a dead organization at that point.
> I like Mozilla and thought Pocket's future would be relatively safe in their hands.
Never trust a company like this. You'll always get burned. If it's not FOSS, its not reliable and will likely burn you
Mozilla's track record of shutting down projects is almost as bad as Google's. I wouldn't count on any of their non-Firefox projects lasting very long.
> I'm sure a lot of HN readers view any of Mozilla's operations outside of Firefox as a distraction
For most people, Mozilla is just the company developing Firefox and Firefox is the Mozilla product. Mozilla's pivot into the web's hero is coming at the price of Firefox and people are not happy. Their current situation where they depend financially on Google just doesn't feel right. And I understand that Google has been asked to stop financing Mozilla. Tough times will be coming for them
I migrated to raindrop.io[1] few months back and IIRC the file downloaded from Pocket did have tags. I again tried following the same steps and the CSV does have tags so I'm not sure why they save the export will not have tags?
The tags are exported : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-l...
What is contained in the export file?
Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links. Additionally, the export does contain tags or highlights.
The page was "Last updated: 24 minutes ago". Someone at Mozilla saw this HN post and modified it (unsure if the export feature itself was changed or not).
You can tell it's a rushed edit as "Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links. Additionally, the export does contain tags or highlights." reads very unnatural.
Via Wayback Machine, it can be easily verified that the old versions of it, both the one edited very recently or the old ones in 2024, said "does not contain tags or highlights".
https://web.archive.org/web/20250415002842/https://support.m...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250522175656/https://support.m...
My export from March had tags, my guess is this docs page just got missed when they updated the export months ago
Doesn't have to be a conspiracy. They saw a comment about a mistake in the article and made a clumsy edit in an attempt to remedy the mistake.
I didn't mean that there is a conspiracy, just that OP wasn't lying and the doc was indeed saying it won't save tags.
(Now I read it, it does sound like so. My bad.)
No worries! Perhaps i shouldn't have assumed that so much investigation implied a conspiracy theory.
Not sure what they mean by tags, but my export seems to have all my tags.
I just did an export while trying to create an importer to my app DoubleMemory. Pocket actually does export tags. It’s probably a miscommunication.
Here is what the raw csv look like if you check my tool example: https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/pocket/
The text that’s separated by pipe are the tags.
the csv file I downloaded has a column for tags, pipe separated
I just got my export, and it has the tags.
Fields are: title, url, time_added, tags, and status
The tags field is a pipe-separated list of tags
Downthemall might help with downloading all those links, depending on what they are.
I never used Pocket but was a long time user of Instapaper before moving to Readwise Reader. My experience has been that many links, other than the most recent ones, are dead.
anyone have any good suggestions for a self-hosted option?
I've tried all of the options: Linkwarden, Linkding, Karakeep, Shiori, Wallabag, Grimoire—you name it, I've tried it. These are all great tools, and I use Karakeep myself, but I use it to bookmark and archive links, not as a "read it later" tool.
In my opinion, no self-hosted read-it-later tool can replace Instapaper or Pocket, as they focus on providing an exceptional reading experience in a native app that works offline. None of the self-hosted tools offer a comparable experience.
So, depending on how you used Pocket, there are either better or no self-hosted options.
I wish Mozilla would open-source Pocket so it could be made into a self-hostable option.
> Wallabag
They open sourced some stuff already https://github.com/Pocket
I use linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
Have been hosting it for years, there’s a browser extension and a phone app by a third party developer as well.
I also tried readeck for a while but went back to lindking because of missing features
There’s also linkwarden
https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden
Too colourful for me, can’t like the design
And there’s also karakeep
I wrote this Deno script to convert the Pocket CSV export to a Bookmark HTML-file so that it can be imported to Linkding: https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark
I'm using & developing Omnom (read-only demo: https://omnom.zone/ ). It is self-hosted, free software, fediverse compatible and creates 1:1 snapshots of the saved websites: https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom
This looks great! Does it capture the website from what is currently rendered in the browser, or does it get it through a separate get request? In other words, if I am on a site that is only locally available or is logged in, will it still capture the website?
Great project name!
Oh man. I have been working on a side project just for this purpose. The aim is to create a pocket like experience (with additional functionality like handling other media types) that is local first, unhosted, and more future-proof (no lock in).
All data is stored entirely on your device, and you have the option to sync it to your own storage provider like dropbox. This means you don't need to have the technical know-how to setup and maintain a server.
Its not usable yet, as I have rewritten it several times, but in the current iteration it is a client side PWA, so cross platform. Just started a new job so had to take a break for a bit.
Follow if you are interested (I need to update the Readme): https://github.com/jonocodes/savr
I don't understand the Linkding recommendations.
AFAICT Linkding is a bookmarking app, much like Pinboard, not a read-later app like Pocket.
I totally understand you and it seems that a lot of users like myself were using pocket as way to sync bookmarks across devices as well.
Also, linkding offers a way to read it later by using the singlefilextension https://linkding.link/archiving/
Thanks for the clarification.
There is readeck, linkwarden and karakeep. Each has a slight different focus (readeck probably has the most read it later focus). There is also omnivore, but I have been struggling to get it to work selhosting (there currently is a bug that prevents signing in), it is also quite resource heavy.
This might come off as dismissive, but after using services like Delicious from way back, I've more or less ended up using Obsidian to edit a few markdown files that contain links to stuff I liked.
I know there are services that offer more, but if I look at how I __actually__ used them, this does the trick.
WordPress + Friends + Post Collection plugins (+send to e-reader), see https://youtu.be/kHaODAUazwE?t=214
I've been using https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding and highly recommend it.
I've been using Readeck, but I never actually used pocket, so I'm not sure how comparable they are.
Karakeep is good. You can import the pocket bookmarks. It can do automatic AI tagging.
> and I will never trust Mozilla with any service again.
Who will you trust? Google? Apple? Microsoft? It's not like any of the other behemoths have a better track record when it comes to long-term maintenance and availability of hosted consumer products. If anything, Mozilla actually has the best track record out of them all when it comes to long-term offerings.
> Who will you trust?
Your-self-hosted?
Your-self-hosted?
Only if you're among the .0001% of people who can code it yourself. Otherwise, nothing is different; you're always relying on someone else for their software, feature, security, and compatibility updates.
Code? For self-hosting? I hope not. Most programmers shouldn’t be programming internet-facing stuff. (FWIW I include myself in “most programmers”).
Get it from your repository. In that case you are trusting somebody like Debian or Redhat. They’ve earned an awful lot of trust.
Are we on Hacker News?
Yeah, bit weird - surely the population of HN is either going to be
- people who _can_ code it themselves, or
- people who believe they can get AI to code it for them
I'm in a third group:
people who can decide if somebody else's code is "good enough" to host it themselves
For my definition of code in this context you're in the first group, as you're doubtless going to have to modify some Dockerfile/.env/config.yaml to point the flapdoodle_cache setting to /usr/local/.this/fnar
It's a pity Sandstorm never super took off. Portable serverless with really nice security built in meant really easy to deploy apps; app server just for you or for a group of people was so nice & easy.
I really hope we someday have self-hosting that isn't as intimidating, that isn't a million different systems all complex in their own way, where there's a base platform with base assumptions and base tools, that let's us manage our self-hosted apps & their data.
I'm self-hosting a couple of services that stopped receiving updates (including security updates) about 10 years ago. They still serve my needs perfectly well. They're hidden behind HTTP authentication (with HTTPS) so the internet noise ("AI" shit, web scrapers, shodan, script kiddies) doesn't even know they exist.
> Who will you trust? Google?
Google has very good/complete Takeout data for most of its services.
What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
> What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.
Apple is a bit of a weird case because historically they've been a hardware company first and have done very little in the way of consumer services. But they're just as happy as to kill off consumer products if they want to; they just have a more limited selection to start from (which is itself another layer to the "problem" of trying to use them as a replacement - you can't rely on a product they don't offer).
iTunes Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping. I never trusted Apple after they got rid of that /s
Apple's problem is they'll often leave products to be stagnant. Existing, but on life support. Like basically all their Mac Apps. A lot of hardware products like this as well, like HomePods.
They have a raft of iOS apps that seemingly come out of hackathon projects that they release, never update, and then maybe quietly kill off. I thought they killed Clips, but it's still hanging out there...
His point is about data portability, not service uptime.
This export feature is outright bad, worse than the industry standard by a mile. Why wouldn't it include something as basic as tags? It just forces users to write their own scripts, wasting time for everyone involved.
It does include tags
I trust none of that ones, only Google for one of my emails and my Android phone. The track of abandoned services of Mozilla is astonishing.
Chasing the ever-cycling list of organizations that haven't yet betrayed trust with regards to privacy. If you're going to go with the "who can you trust" angle then you need to qualify that with a type of product.
Also?
An organization's past doesn't dictate their present.
I built Obsidian Web Clipper (open source, MIT) to replace my read-it-later app and save everything to local markdown files. Now that Obsidian Bases is available, it makes for a very nice web archival tool and reading experience. Here's a video:
https://mastodon.social/@kepano/114553164915046938
You can use Web Clipper with any app that supports Markdown, not just Obsidian.
Defuddle is the underlying HTML-to-Markdown library I made for Web Clipper, and can also be used as a CLI:
Do you have a trick for getting the images as well, as opposed to them being links to the remotely hosted?
Obsidian recently introduced a native 'Download attachments for current file' which you can invoke with cmd / ctrl + p.
I like this as I don't always want all the images for something I've clipped from the web. This gives me the choice.
I think that is just a convenient way to do it with markdown.
Theoretically you could embed images in markdown with 'data:' scheme. But I am unless it is very small images it will probably not be very efficient to embedded the data in a text file.
Thank you for your work on this! It's become my go-to since leaving Pocket.
I do have a bug report: even when explicitly specifying which vault to send clippings to, what I experience is that it sends to my last opened one. On Android w Firefox Nightly and the extension.
This is very cool.
The thing I really want is this, combined with some automated local background LLM training / rag (not sure what the right approach is) process. So that, at the end of the day, everything I bookmark get saved locally, can be read in a nice format like you have the video, and be semantically queried, and it's all local:
"What was that article I saw read 1-3 months ago some new type of LLM training?"
"Find that really nice explanation of determinants article"
etc...
Have you investigated anything like that?
Since the content is saved to Markdown you can use it with pretty much any tool that will ingest that content.
There's also Obsidian Web Clipper's Interpreter feature, which lets you run prompts on a web page before saving:
I wish I could just buy out Mozilla outright so that they could you know, focus on building a browser. Alas, my wallets nowhere near big enough to do so.
Leave all the business ventures to a completely different (named too) org. I grow tired of them starting something great and then stopping because they've wasted funds. Like oxidizing Firefox I was really excited for. Sadly they stopped while they had broken amazing ground.
It isn't just the business ventures. Mozilla has pissed away funds on feel good activities that have nothing to do with developing a browser.
Let's not forget giving their CEO raises and bonuses while holding layoffs the same year.
They are cooked.
Yeah I agree, I'm sure we're not even scratching the surface.
I kind of want to buy pocket and fakespot.
You would buy them out so they could focus 100% of their time to an endeavor that doesn't bring in any money except from a ludicrously generous gift from Google that might be illegal?
Like I get it, I wish they could just be a browser company too but all their other side ventures are desperate attempts to diversify their revenue. They don't have a billion dollar ad business obviate their need to actually be a business.
Vivaldi seems to be doing ok and they only focus on a free browser. Brave seems to be doing well too, even if some of what they're doing is controversial. I admire them for at least taking a shot.
I don't necessarily fault Mozilla for trying to diversify revenue. The problem is when they neglect the browser to work on silly projects like Pocket, VPN's, mail relay, etc. and not even do a good job on those either. All of them were bolted on via acquisition or partnership, felt like an afterthought, and didn't provide anything that wasn't already easily accessible.
The organization doesn't execute well at any level and hasn't for a long time. They only exist because of Google and the remaining holdout users who feel obligated to use a sub-par, non-Chromium browser. I'm finally off that bandwagon. For the first time in over 20 years, I don't even have Mozilla's browser installed on my system.
The more I think of who I wish would buy them out based on some of the things they've done for side funding. I think someone like CloudFlare (not Google, Microsoft or Apple) would fit the bill for me. Mozilla birthed Rust, they very likely still have Rust talent onboard. CloudFlare relies on Rust for critical software.
I kind of miss the world the Mozilla was going all in on Rust for Firefox, I think the language could benefit greatly from it, especially in terms of out of the box libraries. One of my hopes was that Rust would eventually build out a standard GUI stack that's cross-platform that would be used by Firefox, but could be used by everyone. Same could be said of all the different pieces that make up Firefox, including the JS engine, could have been its own discrete Rust crate.
> You would buy them out so they could focus 100% of their time to an endeavor that doesn't bring in any money except from a ludicrously generous gift from Google that might be illegal?
If I could buy them out, I wouldn't be taking any money from Google ;)
A charity focusing on their mission instead of making money? Inconceivable!
Super bummed about this.
I know a surprising number of high profile CEOs and founders who live by Pocket, really has just been quietly reliable and simple way to reserve content for later.
Despite there being so many other $apps that can fill the gap here, none of them seem to be as clean and straightforward as Pocket has been for me.
Anyone here paying for Matter or Readwise? I know Instapaper may seem to be the obvious migration path, but since my landlord is kicking me out, maybe it’s time I move to a more robust solution.
I have been paying for readwise for about a year and a half now. I was a pocket subscriber for years before they got bought out by Firefox. All that said, I wouldn't call myself an advanced user of either (tag a lot less than I would like, want to revisit more than I do, etc.).
I am reasonably satisfied with read wise as a replacement/upgrade to pocket and will continue to pay for it for the time being. My least favorite part is it needs 2 apps/extensions for full functionality (readwise and reader). It works but feels clunkier to me than it needs to be.
That is definitely one of the biggest painpoints, and we feel it ourselves for whatever it's worth!
However, if you're just looking for a replacement for Pocket, you only need the Reader app/extension and it shouldn't be clunky at all.
It's only if you want our highlight-specific reviewing/exporting functionality that you would also need the Readwise app... still not ideal, but merging two complex products like this without making the experience janky/complicated for new users is a really really hard problem!
The current pricing of Readwise seems like it will not be attractive to the 99% of Pocket users who are just looking for a reader app, and don't want to plunk down $120 every year for that (and various other features they aren't looking for).
It looks like you have a "Lite" tier that doesn't include the reader app. Maybe there should be a free tier that offers only the reader app, and you can try to upsell users from there. Otherwise people who just want a reader app will migrate to Instapaper or other free reader apps. I know that's what I plan on doing!
A lite tier that's only the Reader app would be great. I'm exploring self hosted options to replace Readwise Reader due to the price being a little hard to justify and not using most of the features except the website saving.
BookFusion (cross platform ePub reading app) by comparison has a great pricing structure that makes it hard to ever consider unsubscribing for the value I get. Highly recommend the app for anyone who uses Android eReaders in combo with iOS devices/desktop.
Even when I was a new user right as Reader was getting started, I didn't think it was clunky to be honest. I thought it was clear when I was using one vs. the other. The only problem I've ever had is that typing/saying "Readwise Reader" is a bit clunky when discussing the product, but "Readwise" refers to the other one, and "Reader" isn't a sufficient name itself.
I only use Reader. What's the other for?
I pay for Readwise Reader and it's pretty great, although I have been noticing issues extracting the full text on certain sites. It sometimes just seems to give up and the extract contains an empty block and is 1/10 of the expected length. A bit frustrating since that's my main use case.
Been using readwise. I quite like it. I'll gladly pay the price if it means preventing encrapification down the road.
It does everything that I liked out of Pocket and Omnivore.
It also has a neat sync feature where all my notes/highlights get saved to my Obsidian.
I tried Matter but it lacked Android support at the time so didn't go deep into it. I've been a heavy Readwise user for the last two years or so. It's better than Pocket in almost every way, although as I've moved into the 99.9th percentile of archive size I'm seeing some annoying perf issues they'll hopefully fix. At least they have a Discord and are making actual updates to the app, something that Pocket stopped doing probably five years ago.
I'm using the free version of Matter, and it seems like a good improvement over Pocket. It managed to import most of my Pocket saves too.
I can't recommend Raindrop enough if you're looking for alternatives
Matter user here. I love the app, currently on the paid plan.
It has some nice bells and whistles (reading articles to you, highlights, etc) but it does the core job of saving articles for reading really well.
I’m not a pocket user so it may or may not be a good substitute but worth trying. I wish Matter worked on the kobo but there’s no API AFAIK (they do have a few of their own integrations with Obsidian and Readwise).
I have been using Obsidian Web Clipper to save stuff to read later. If you already use Obsidian it's worth a shot. It's not perfect but it does a reasonable job of translating articles etc. into markdown. I don't actually know if it saves images locally, I suspect not (which is probably a pretty big weakness)
it saves images locally in your vault
edit: sorry, the clipper links them
I used Matter for a few weeks and it was fine. The email newsletter collection is interesting but it's sort of a paywalled feature and I didn't really use it much. Several other paywalled features I wasn't interested in. At the time I really wanted an iOS widget and I don't think Matter had one, so I bounced. I'm using Feedly now and really like it, especially for the suggested news RSS feeds. I get by with a free account and it feels like they don't try to convert you very often... Unfortunately the act of adding a new bookmark is weirdly slow on my phone. Maybe that's just my device.
> Anyone here paying for Matter or Readwise? I know Instapaper may seem to be the obvious migration path, but since my landlord is kicking me out, maybe it’s time I move to a more robust solution.
I'd love to know where to migrate my Pocket data. The funny thing is that I had "Migrate Pocket" on my calendar for June 30th.
And are you serious that the exported data doesn't have the tags? Really?
I wonder how a database like this has no value, especially with the customization power brought by AI. Didn't Mozilla think about selling the product?
I exported my data, and tags were there.
> Why is Pocket shutting down?
> Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.
Oh yeah, it explains everything.
I wish one day a company pr representative will be bold enough to just say "we don't want to tell you".
That seems pretty clear to me—many people were using it at one point, but now few are, so it's not worth maintaining.
But why are few people using it?
Critical mass of people using app-based walled gardens? Something else?
They took a tool that is fundamentally about separating curation and consumption of content, then added back the same type of for-you algorithm driven social media, engagement maximizing stuff that people wanted to escape. Not exactly surprising that people don't want to use it.
I read this as: Nobody was using it.
I recently migrated to Linkwarden [0] from Pocket, and have been happy with the decision.
Linkwarden is open source and self-hostable.
I wrote a python package [1] to ease the migration of Pocket exports to Linkwarden.
I really enjoyed https://waldenpond.press/ when it was up and running. They selected articles from your pocket once a month and then printed, bound, and mailed them to you. When I discovered the service I had a 500 hour reading backlog, and for $14/mo I was getting 100+ page books of self-curated content. They were perfect for flights, trips, and lending out. I was able to force it to include recipes as well, and I still find myself referencing them frequently.
I would have absolutely loved this. I would love for someone to do this with Substack or podcast transcripts.
If I’d have known about them sooner, they’d have all my money.
I had the same thought! I've been attempted to cobble together a solution to do essentially this over the years!
Wow this is so neat.
Everytime people talked about Mozilla or Firefox the main complaint was Pocket. Everytime. Yet most people here are sad to see it go. What gives?
If you don't use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want. If you do use Pocket then the acquisition was bad because you don't want to be relying on a weird side project of a company because they'll do a terrible job of maintaining it and it'll inevitably get shut down.
This is exactly correct. And everything happened exactly as written!
> they spent a bunch of money buying an unrelated company to add a feature you don't want
While fiddling (and paying their execs $$$) as the only useful thing they do -- firefox -- crashed and burned into irrelevance. Leaving the company useful only as an ersatz chrome hypothetical competitor to keep the feds / EU at bay. Great for the overpaid people running it; less good for anyone in our industry.
Exec pay: up and to the right.
Marketshare: way down and to the right.
Don't worry guys -- now they're playing VC and AI, at which they're sure to be as good as they were at running Firefox. Though I guess since you could say their only successful product was anti-trust insurance sold to Google, that's at least in the finance space, so in some way related to being a vc...
People really don’t like your comment it seems but you’re right, even if it’s a little on the nose.
I think most people wish it wasn’t true, myself included, but how many times does Mozilla have to show us their priorities are anything but improving and maintaining Firefox itself before we accept the truth?
like grape jelly and tomato soup, two great tastes that don't belong together.
Some people hated pocket, and would complain about it. Different people liked pocket and are commenting here.
The community has people with different viewpoints, and you are seeing different people's comments on different stories (either because different people are commenting or because different comments are getting voted to be visible).
I hated pocket being enabled by default, that's all. I also think a lot of people saw it as adware/spyware even if it technically didn't work that way, which tbh I'm unsure of.
That doesn't mean I wanted it dead. I was happy for the feature to exist and for others to use it. Maybe some people were angry that they even wasted a few KB downloading the extra code for a feature they won't use, but I'd be ok with it.
Nicely articulated. I think their comment encapsulates the disbelief people have about public opinions that differ from their own political viewpoints (and the aspects that had been amplified within their own media/algorithmic bubble).
The complainers were FF users forced to deal with bloat they didn't use, those who are sad here are pocket users. They're just different people. Though, even those who didn't like the bundling of the extension probably didn't actively want the service to fail.
Right. I would be one of the people who saw pocket as an unnecessary distraction, but even I tested it and my opinion is partly based on pocket just not working in my Firefox at the time. I also just did not like that it was given space in the toolbar while a way more important rss button was denied that space. And despite that, I still think the shutdown now is bad - this should be spun out or be moved to a Foss project, and certainly not be killed for more ai nonsense.
BTW, fakespot (the service they also shut down) is or could be an applied ai project where that technology could be helpful, and they also shut it down. That also feels wrong, especially the combination.
Pocket was pushed pretty heavily and basically shoved down the throat of Firefox users. Many obviously complained about this behaviour, either because they had no use for Pocket or already had a different solution. Mozilla was basically mimicking Microsoft behaviour of just forcing products/features onto it's users.
Shortly after the Pocket launch Mozilla stopped pushing Pocket and it became less visible in the Firefox UI. Now it's just a tiny grey button most don't click. So you're either use Pocket and like it, or you don't even think about it.
The main complaint, as I remember it, was mostly how Mozilla positioned Pocket. Some people picked up Pocket over the years, many liked it. These are not necessarily the same people who objected to have Pocket thrown in their face.
Pocket became annoying because Mozilla started shoving it down your throat, whether or not you wanted it. To most FF users, Pocket is (at very best) a source of occasional popups and other UI annoyances. People who had a use for it really liked it, though.
I used Pocket for about 3 years, before and after the acquisition. When Firefox started syncing bookmarks across devices, and they added the reader mode, Pocket became obsolete in my mind. I stopped using it because I didn't need it anymore.
I think it's consistent to be annoyed that they went and bought something and shoved it into everyone's browser, but also that they're taking away a service that people have come to depend on.
There are lots of people with different opinions on the same subject, and not all of them speak up in the same conversations.
Some call this phenomenon the Goomba fallacy.
After about 5 minutes of reading, I'm proclaiming that its proper name shall be the "hivemind fallacy".
I'm just glad it has a funny name instead of something arrogant-sounding like "Dunning-Kruger effect." That was ok in a research setting but got turned into an insult.
I'm quite happy about it. I might even print out a tombstone to piss on.
I'd have had no problem with pocket if it'd been an optional plugin. Or, if it'd been optional at all. If I wanted to go around disabling a bunch of browser bloat, I wouldn't be using Firefox.
I wish there was a "Beg HN:" because I'd love to see a little graveyard with 3d printed tombstones of all the failed and canceled products of all the big tech companies.
People who are happy about something have no reason to post.
You're talking about two entirely different groups of people even though they're all on HN.
That's not true, I sing the praises of things that bring me value all the time. I am, arguably, getting pretty close to "shill" category for some of them. However, I think that behavior should get a pass if the things being shilled are actually FOSS and not just "change from one company to the other"
I think statistically I'm still right. Complaints are always more frequent than positive comments -- and more unsolicited. I always factor that in when reading, for example, product reviews. While there are always people willing to sing the praises of products they like, the average content person is likely to just move on with their lives, and a wronged person cannot wait to tell everyone.
This is also related to Cunningham's Law.
Look at this thread, I've never heard so much positive talk about Pocket in my life. Up until it's imminent demise nobody had any strong inclination to talk positively about it.
You're right. Everywhere I've gone to school or worked, any big online forum was mostly complaints, even though I went to great schools and had cushy jobs. You'd think every course curves to a D- and every employee gets a 10% yearly pay cut. It's simply because one unhappy person can be as active online as 100 happy people.
And on some sites like Yelp where complainers aren't disproportionately active, complaints can have disproportionate power. Like a 4.5-star restaurant's average is affected way more by a 1-star review than a 5-star review.
In my experience people are more likely to complain about things that annoy them than those things which make their lives easier. However, nowhere in that statement will you find "everyone" is more likely to complain, just that the probabilities are much higher for complaining about a thing rather than advocating for a different thing.
Different groups of people.
People tend to be more vocal about negative things in their life than positive things. I think it really boils down to that.
Maybe they were different people?
This is what confused me coming into this thread too! I was wondering what it'd be like consider how widely unpopular pocket is around here. Enough that anytime Firefox is brought up people point to pocket. No one defending it at those times so at just hear negatives. I'm sure there are plenty of different users but it's interesting to see what opinions dominate a thread at a given time.
I think people just like complaining about Firefox and Mozilla. Or maybe it's just that HN likes to complain in general
Either way, good news for Google I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are some from the Pocket disliking group that have made comments here. I bet most don't care that much.
The vast majority of people using Firefox don't care at all.
And then the people are significantly affected, the Pocket users, are going to be the loudest in this thread.
I recognize these are different groups and HN isn't a homogeneous entity.
My explicit point was about perception bias.
My point was about how this bias is often undermining ourselves. In this case, helping Google chrome.
It just seems worth pointing out. That the comment sections in Internet forums seem to preference comments that compilation.
There are a ton of bookmarking software, and good, and self-hosted.
- karakeep
- grimoire
- omnivore
- wallabag
- linkwarden
I myself use RSS reader / bookmark manager that I wrote [1]. Everything is open source. Even data [2] [3].
Links
[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
omnivore got acquired, they shut down: https://web.archive.org/web/20250503155629/https://blog.omni...
It is Self-Hostable. I worked on the self-hosting stuff. Follow the guide here if you're interested: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/blob/main/self-host...
I've been super happy with karakeep: https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
It does have an "import from pocket" feature builtin.
The dev is suuuuper nice and the features have been nicely coming along. Can't wait to see all the features announced.
I've been wanting a tool that does exactly one thing, keep the bookmarks of Firefox and Chrome synced on my local PC. I don't want collaboration, distributed, cloud first, SaaS, friends, notifications, tags, AI, or anything else. Any suggestions for a tool like that?
Don't forget Readeck. I've been super pleased with it. (Omnivore is dead btw.)
Omnivore is open source, bit weird people insist on open source because 'future proof' and then when the commercial entity disappears, it's 'dead'. Why do people make their own instead of making an entity around what is already there if it was liked and open? Very much a validation for not open sourcing anyway. But then again, I cannot possibly use Obsidian or so because when they sell the place (not if, when), sure I have the open format, but not the nice tooling. I rather struggle with inferior open source products and contribute on those than having to go through these 'Google bought us, you have 2 months to export your data' kind of thing.
You can still host it, and pressumably it should keep working, I wouldn't set up a new instance with it because I don't quite see an active dev community around it (But I do with Wallabag or Shiori), no one is stopping the community if there's interest
Around obsidian, as long as you avoid plugins that don't store data as plain text there's nothing to export and you could use any text editor (Or even IDE) in place of obsidian
No boilerplate has an interesting video about it, Obsidian: The Good Parts [1], I can open my Vault with VSCode or nvim and have all my data, sans the pretty views, because I also avoid the non text extensions, and if push comes to shove, I can grep for tags or something simple like that
Obsidian might sell (Maybe when one of the founders/owners go away), but it's not like they have investors to appease, they could keep the show going indefinitely as far as I can tell
Right, I was referring more to the commercial project (similar to Pocket ending). I was testy about it because it was one of the best I'd seen in a while ... until it wasn't. I'm glad it's continued on as an open source, community project.
Seems like official export [0] has tags and annotations along with timestamps. However in case you'd like more structured full data from the API (instead of a mess with csv + json?), you can use my tool [1] to export it. Here's example of its output [2]
[0] https://getpocket.com/export
[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport?tab=readme-ov-file#s...
[2] https://github.com/karlicoss/pockexport/blob/master/example-...
Wow, after Instapaper went back to indie from Pinterest[1] and Omnivore closing last year this is no longer surprising. This is also proof that read-it-later app as a category is not sustainable as a venture / company backed service.
This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps. As there is no reason why a server has to be requirement to enjoy the full service. Your computer is fully capable of interacting with these webpages directly....
On Apple ecosystem, there are few alternatives one can migrate to. I also created an app that target this category (and more) called DoubleMemory: https://doublememory.com that has a few different takes as well:
- no registration needed (icloud sync)
- no extension required (just double command + c)
- launches from menu bar as a launcher, in a stunning Pinterest-style waterfall grid
It's all free to use with no limits, as i'm still working on paid features. I'll work on a pocket importer for these who are interested in migrating.
> This is also a category of app that I believe could be better served by local-first native apps.
I don't think you even need apps for that. I don't need to save everything forever but I do want to save articles to read offline, after transferring them to the phone:
- I transform the page into an epub thanks to browser extensions (for example this one: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saveasebook/>) - I save the content in a special "toread" folder that is synced with syncthing - From my phone I can open all files in pretty much any epub app - With a few scripts I can search in them
Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.
I’d be curious on the stats of these services. Myself, I save a lot of things with good intentions and then never go back to actually read anything later. For a stand alone service, this is the worst. I send them data to store, then never do anything with it. I have to imagine this is quite common, considering the amount of information coming at people every day. It’s always more than I can handle, so it’s not like I ever run out and need to head to the saved articles.
I’m looking at using ChatGPT to help me process through all of it, just to make sure there wasn’t something I actually wanted.
A few weeks ago in the HN comments someone mentioned their philosophy on it was YAGRI… You Ain’t Gonna Read It. I may have made up that phrasing, playing of YAGNI, but that’s how I remember it. Basically, if you aren’t going to read it right now, you probably never will, so let it go.
I have a read later “service” called keeping a couple hundred tabs open at once (enabled with Sidebury vertical tabs and their panels). Works great for me.
I have 134 tabs open on my phone right now. Every few months I get fed up enough and close them all, or maybe all but 3.
That's indeed the bane of this category of apps. You save it but don't ever go back. Yet we all intuitively want to use it as we can never allocate the right mental space at the right time. Our brain usually are in the browsing mode when we are on social, and needs a slightly different mindset when we are ready to dive into a long read.
I believe there are path forward with this category of apps though. Capturing is just step 0. Self-organizing so retrieval is super easy is step 1. Condensing and summarizing information are also possible with local models or MCP.
> You save it but don't ever go back.
I have a thing which picks 10 random unread "old-ish" links from Pocket (via my local DB) and emails them to me. (Used to be an iOS Shortcut but Pocket's API got in the way and I turned it into Go on my server instead.) Quite handy for surfacing things you've forgotten about but the linkrot in older saves means it's sadly often useless.
Cool. I'm actually planning to add shortcuts to DM as well. I'm not a heavy user but am becoming a fan...
>> Apple also has a read later service built into Safari. It’s not the most feature rich, but it has existed for several years now.
I was a big Instapaper user until they added Reading List to Safari. It's just enough features, it's built into all my devices, and it's the thing that keeps me using Safari too (Chrome's reading list implementation sucks).
The thing I don’t like about Apple’s implementation is the All list doesn’t show read/unread status. There is a list for unread, but not for read.
I just pulled mine up to go through it and if I had to guess I have about 5 read out of probably 250. Which 5 those are, no idea. I also find it very easy to accidentally click on an item, which marks it as read without any visual indication. I just have to know this, and then remember to right-click and mark unread.
I spent a little time this afternoon (maybe 10 minutes) looking at export options to get the data in a way I can go through it. It seems to be stored in a plist along with the bookmarks. plutil has an export option, but it won’t export to json (it throws an error), so I’m left with 150k lines of XML, which then converted to 31k lines of json. I’m now debating if I should continue down this road, or just plow through it in Safari. There are some things on GitHub, but I don’t want to run them without reviewing the code, and at that point, I’d rather write my own. Maybe I’ll use it an excuse to try out duckdb.
It's actually all saved in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist as bookmarks. You can drop that into https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6811b049cbdc8191b91c6ed291a88e4f-dou... which is a custom GPT I created for DoubleMemory. And see if it works. I do have plans to automate this in the future, right now still trying to collect feature requests confirmation tho.
I appreciate it, but I don't like the idea of uploading my whole bookmark file. I ended up vibe coding something with ChatGPT. It also asked to upload it, but I vetoed that and made it work. Since it is a well known file, it had data to work with.
Turns out all my exports were a waste of time, as it made it overly complicated and hard to parse, so it took the plist, extracted the reading list, pulled out the values I wanted (extracted the domain to give me that, because siteName was missing on almost everything), and gave me some clean json and a csv.
It turns out I had over 450 items in there. I thought it was going to be half that. I would never have gotten through that in Safari. Hopefully this will make it easier to scan through and dismiss most of these, and maybe highlight the couple I might still want. I have articles dating back to 2016... yikes.
Your app looks great, I love when apps make good use of iCloud syncing.
If you don't mind me asking, what's your plan for monetization? I'm considering moving over from Raindrop.io, but am a bit worried about basic features ending up behind a subscription.
My plan is to keep everything free and work on value generating features that will focus on organization and consumption. Think of it this way, most features we have so far are just making it easy to capture, which is just step one. The users are giving us a chance to keep their content. We don’t really generate any value until they later search it or consume it. I’m hoping to align to that value.
Practically speaking, I’m planning to keep existing features free with no limits. I’ll be working on these truly value generating features with a bit more limits at a fair price so it can sustain the development.
This looks like a lovely body of work.
I do have to say I am reluctant to even try it because the idea of essentially hijacking the copy shortcut really makes me anxious.
Especially because I often press command c multiple times to ensure the thing I want is registered. Using that as a trigger sounds like it would punish me.
I’d normally brush this off, but here the entirety of the pitch is centered around the idea of that command, rather than its value prop.
Hope this gives some insight!
That's how it inspired me to create this app really. I often do this to important text subconsciously so one day I asked what if i can automatically save that... It feels intuitive and avoids the extensions.
With that said, you can disable this double copy trigger easily, it's an menu bar option if you right click the icon. Also there are other ways to capture: share sheet, service menu, drag and drop into the app icon or into the menu bar icon.
On ios, it doesn't have this double copy magic obviously, so it just functions as a normal pretty read-it-later app. Hope that clarify things!
Just added a Pocket Importer for those who are interested in giving DoubleMemory a try: https://doublememory.com/posts/tools/
You can also import from ReadWise, Omnivore or any other format via our custom GPT importer...
I actually don't necessarily think that's true - As someone that has a bit of a background with the codebase of Omnivore I think the thing that killed that wasn't necessarily the business model (let's be real, they didn't even offer a premium tier.)
I think it was the introduction of features that required an unnecessary amount of processing power. Namely, RSS feeds. Their RSS implementation parsed every new webpage - a large percentage of which would never actually be read.
They hosted on Google Cloud using things like Cloud Functions. A good proportion of articles were parsed using Puppeteer, when a cheaper shorter running HTTP Request would have sufficed. The PDF viewer they used cost an arm and a leg.
None of this is to shit on the legacy of Omnivore, because I think with the team they had they built an incredible product. But I think there was a lot that could have been done to reduce monthly costs, and that there could have been more effort to monetise.
I paid for Pocket (without using premium features), and I donated to Omnivore, but the thing is ... I happened across their community whilst doing / building something else. I wouldn't have known donating / subscribing were even an option if I didn't. I'm sure I'm not the only kind of person who subscribes purely based on the fact I get value from the software.
I'd like to believe there's a viable business model around these sort of things. And honestly, a much less ethical version of me says that there absolutely is when it comes to Data. I don't think it'll ever be mega profitable, but sustainable? Sure. The Omnivore team was like 2 devs and open source contributors. I believe you could get to a point where it'd be able to sustain that team.
You are right. The architecture is just creating burdens and frictions to sustain the business if mostly relies on freemium user expansion. This is especially attractive to VC backed companies as they sometimes are judged by their growth when they are pre-revenue. And growth with free users is like a poisonous apple, that looks appealing but only accelerate the burning of your cash pile. To the point that it's afraid of charge money that may impact their main growth metrics.
I do believe apps like ReadWise that charges a subscription will have a more likelihood of surviving. Or Omnivore if it's less aggressive in expanding to compute-heavy features without charging.
My main point is, this is a category that's better served by local-first architecture, on Apple ecosystem, you also have the added benefit of having icloud sync for free.
I loved using Omnivore, and I've found so far in building https://curi.ooo that you can actually do a lot of the legwork in rendering webpages client-side (even on mobile) so that the server-side processing is just used to simplify the HTML. Obviously I'm nowhere near Omnivore's scale but so far costs have been extremely manageable.
I've been building a pocket alternative that also bundles an RSS editor (RIP google reader) and a light blogging platform.
The idea is basically to bundle the saving, discovering and sharing content through the same product. I've been using it for a year and it works beautifully.
And you can see my bookmarks/posts here: https://fika.bar/blogs/paoramen
Love this. Great UI and straight to the point. Thank you for sharing.
One thing I'm curious about, is there a way to add a bookmark from a browser on iPhone ? When I'm browsing I often want to save an article in my reading list, right now I'm using Notion with the Share feature. Curious if you had the same need.
By any chance, are you also working on a Firefox extension?
I have used Wallabag[0] for read-later articles for many years. Very happy about it. I host it on a VPS but they offer a paid instance[1] themselves for $9/y. And otherwise you can use something like Pikapods[2] which is also dirt cheap.
[0] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag [1] https://www.wallabag.it/en [2] https://www.pikapods.com/apps
Related bit from my other comment:
> If you don't want to bother with self-hosting, there are some hosted options available: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...
I used Pocket until they remove the ability to save page as offline (moved to premium tier afak) and also shoving sponsored content here and there.
I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than ~~useless~~ useful to me.
[1]Raindrop.io
> I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than useless to me.
Low bar to hit.
Oops a typo.
Adding to that, all i want is a download current page to read offline, sort of like pdf (embedded image and styles) but on reading mode.
If that's all you need, you could try the SingleFile browser extension. Works great on mobile, too.
> I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than ~~useless~~ useful to me.
HN does not support whatever markup you are trying to use. You have to use Unicode:
“I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than u̶s̶e̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ useful to me.”
I’ve been using Raindrop and have used the Permanent Copy (offline) feature enough that I wouldn’t consider doing without it. It’s worth every penny if you ask me. And you can host it yourself AFAIK, I just haven’t looked into it much.
They should at least allow to download their copy of the saved articles, PDF or HTML or whatever format they save it in.
This is such a betrayal. Some old links might not exist anymore, so it's useless to only get the links.
EDIT: Betrayal, because the main reason I paid for Pocket was the archiving of articles and now I can't actually export the archived copies.
Their decision of not enabling export of the archived copies now makes it very unlikely that I'll ever pay for any of their paid services in the future.
A shame really because I like supporting Firefox as a browser.
I totally agree.
That's what I paid for. I trusted in Mozilla being open and allowing me to take my data with me. This is worse than Google?A forever home for your collection. Pocket becomes your permanent library—so even if a page you've saved is taken down, you'll still have a copy of it in PocketI think doing this would expose how poorly they've actually saved their copies of articles. Pocket has always had a very funny definition of "permanent copy" which doesn't mean what you think it does! I'm a little saddened by their demise but the service has been so terrible for so long that I've long since moved to the much superior Readwise.
I remember requesting the source code after they bought it[1]. They kept kicking the can down the road. It looks like they dumped everything in a monorepo on Github[2] which does nothing good for anyone.
Seems like Mozilla is dead-set on grinding up any good will they get from users.
[1]: https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/pocket-source-code/43686/11 [2]: https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-monorepo
What's wrong with a monorepo?
Kobo (ereader) + Pocket was always just an amazing and low friction combo. This blows.
I was a paying Pocket customer until a few weeks ago. I switched to Wallabag plus https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako/ to sync to my Kobo. It's not polished, but honestly neither was Pocket with their decline in both article parsing and the iOS apps over the last few years.
Hopefully this situation encourages more contribution and improvement to tools like these.
What if Rakuten reimplemented their own version of Pocket and offered it as a Firefox add-on? A man can dream.
I used this a lot, and had a tool specifically to replace it with another service. I see others created a fork too. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
They'll probably remove it now, and I am devastated about that, because I still use it pretty often with my Self-Hosted Omnivore.
I might see if I can find a way to prevent updates in the future. Or hopefully they just hide the Menu Option and keep the code intact so that I can use KoboMenu to re-enable it.
If anyone from Kobo is reading, please just hide it - don't remove all the code - thanks.
Yep, this got me hooked on pocket as well. I had/have so many articles on there that ar easy to read on a bus / train / plane or in bed before falling asleep.
And the reasons to shutdown are pretty lame. “ But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.”
It worked for me? And probably at least hundreds or thousands others?
Was really considering using https://www.reademaillater.com/ to sync long newsletters (mainly Matt Levine, which isn't available free on the web but is via email) to my Kobo, and this sucks.
My first thought as well. I wonder what Kobo will do in response to this announcement.
Me too, I hope there will be a replacement with the same low friction.
I've been using IFTTT with RSS feeds to add serialized stories to my Kobo as they release.
Could you share the flow if someone wanted to replicate it for their own Kobo?
They should be able to change it with fairly minimal changes. I managed to modify some things to proxy articles from Omnivore to it, and the functionality remained largely the same across the two services.
They'd have to implement some kind of login, but they they should just be able to build some kind of converter between whatever format and the format that is expected by the Kobo device.
This is the primary way I read longer articles on the internet. I hope something else pops up because this changes my daily routine pretty significantly.
Is the shutdown date possibly related to this info I was able to find from the DOJ?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-implements...
> As explained in NSD’s Data Security Program Implementation and Enforcement Policy Through July 8, 2025, NSD will not prioritize civil enforcement actions against any person for violations of the Data Security Program that occur from April 8 through July 8, 2025, so long as the person is engaging in good faith efforts to comply with or come into compliance with the Data Security Program during that time. These efforts include engaging in compliance activities described in that policy, such as amending or renegotiating existing contracts, conducting internal reviews of data flows, deploying the CISA security requirements, and so on.
> At the end of this 90-day period, individuals, and entities should be in full compliance with the DSP. This policy does not limit NSD’s lawful authority and discretion to pursue civil enforcement if entities and individuals did not engage in good faith efforts to comply with, or come into compliance with, the Data Security Program.
I would say I was sad to see it go, but I moved to karakeep (formerly known as Hoarder) a few months ago and it's been a perfect replacement. Most importantly, you can self-host it - which is great.
One thing that stood out to me in the article was this this to justify the shutdown
> But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.
I'd be really interested to hear what exactly they mean by this, are people visiting fewer websites? Walled gardens like facebook etc make it useless for bookmarking so I can see how pocket would be a bad fit there
here's the list of alternatives, extracted from this thread:
Instapaper is a good alternative.
Readwise Reader is a strong paid alternative, especially for heavy users and those wanting integration with tools like Obsidian.
Raindrop.io is a useful alternative, including its free tier and permanent copy feature.
Matter is another alternative that has been tried.
Self-hosted options like Wallabag, Linkding, Linkwarden, Karakeep, Omnivore, and Shiori exist.
Obsidian Web Clipper can save articles as markdown locally.
Other less common or custom solutions include Feedly, Histre, Walden Pond (defunct print service), Lighthouse, Full Sort, DoubleMemory (Apple ecosystem), Ulry.app, WordPress plugins, simple text files/spreadsheets, or custom scripts.
(Full summary here: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/mozilla-pocket-shutdown-discu...
Hard to say if I cared a wit for pocket, but fakespot was useful.
I had no confidence in fakespot's ratings.
I was always suspicious of Fakespot's ratings and had very little ways to properly A/B test. I would see products on Amazon - both with 4.5 stars - but one would have a Fakespot score of 1 star and the other would be 4 stars.
After that Honey expose I started to wonder if Fakespot was simply trying to steal the last click referrer and using its "we filter fake reviews" as a cover/lure to get people to use it.
I thought Fakespot was an interesting premise for using LLMs in a vaguely legitimate way, but I did get the sensation that by using it, it would eventually come out years later that it was doing something nefarious, similar to Honey.
My assumption was that it would either teach fake reviews to get much better to be harder to identify...or it'd get sold off to some company that had a vested interest in keeping fake reviews around. I suppose this second possibility could still be the case! :)
Very sad to see Pocket. I had briefly been a paid user. Really shocked, not sure what is an easy alternative beyond Pinterest, which itself a nightmare nowadays.
A little surprised to see the sadness regarding something that seemed to be universally scorned whenever it was brought up. I never tried it and don't really have an opinion, but why couldn't this functionality be created as an extension (possibly connecting to a 3rd party service? I don't know why that would be necessary. Can extensions throw stuff into firefox sync?)?
An extension is what it was, before Firefox bought it. It's what it still is, on other browsers.
I used it to save things, and read it on multiple devices. The readability view was never my chief concern.
There was also a period in the history of Pocket where they had influential people share their stories, and shared the top stories on the Web. It was these things that I loved about Pocket. It was a fairly easy way to get a view on the most interesting stories that other people were talking about.
I have had such a hard time finding replacements for this workflow. I built an RSS Reader into Omnivore (Separate from their implementation) to try to emulate it, but it obviously wasn't the same.
Pocket had a lot of potential, and in an era of fragmented media companies - and the paywalling of everything I really think there was an interesting business model around unifying things or acting as a quasi-publisher.
It could have been so much, and in the end it just died. Mismanaged. It's a sad story.
Yes, extensions can save into Firefox Sync.
Thank you for the link. I didn't realize Fakespot is also getting shut down. I guess these acquisitions didn't work out so well profit-wise, but it's good to see more focus on their core browser.
The "Save to Pocket" button at the bottom is a nice touch.
I'm actually excited about this - it's one less thing I need to disable in `about:config`. I've always been confused as to why pocket is integrated directly into the browser as opposed to being a browser extension.
Ugh, and that only months after Omnivore (a really great FOSS "read it later" app) shut down.
The one constant of "save your favorite articles and websites offline, forever" apps seems to be that they're... very much not forever.
In my view, this not being a native, interoperable feature of web browsers is a failure of the web. I'll be able to listen to a podcast episode I've downloaded as an MP3 forever, and the same goes for ePub books (if they don't have DRM in any case) – so why is the same so hard for blog posts and articles?
I just Ctrl+P print the reader mode output to PDF. Takes 1 second. I've been doing it for years and it works perfectly. I have articles I saved from a decade ago in Dropbox. I'm honestly surprised people use a whole app for such a trivial feature, but yeah it's fair to have special needs. For me, Firefox reader mode is all I need, and you can just save it as PDF.
PDFs are the opposite of what I personally want from an archival format. I primarily want to be able to read the article on any screen size (on the go, when there's no Internet connection), and PDF falls flat for that.
Even on my computer, not many pages have a nice print stylesheet, and the result frequently looks horrible/nothing like the original page.
You'll be able to read an article you save locally forever as well, that's the easy part
Yes, but saving it locally is the hard/unergonomic part.
There's the great SingleFile extension, but it doesn't always work, and it's a bit of a pain to do on mobile compared to just sending a page off to a reading app via the share sheet on iOS.
"unergonomic" exactly! But that's the same for an mp3 podcast episode! You can't easily save one on a mobile to auto-sync with your other computers and also allow highighting/tagging/syncing playback position/favorites.
Ergonomic is precisely the core value proposition of all these services, "dumb" save has been possible for any such content since forever.
Pocket is a bit like Pinterest: It’s actually a joy to use, but it has a significant number of haters because it’s forced on people who don’t want it.
This is why, as a non-user, I’m celebrating its death for the simple reason that it won’t be integrated in Firefox anymore.
Mozilla completely did this to themselves.
I'm very sad about this. The one feature that I really like is that you could read articles offline. Any good alternatives?
(saves this HN post to Pocket to come back to it later to see replies)
I've been using Instapaper for years and have always been very happy with it.
I’m so happy with Instapaper I have no idea what other apps have to offer.
See, save, read later - I’m sorted.
Glad to hear :-)
If you like Self-Hosting - Omnivore is still a fantastic product. And the iOS app has been recently fixed to work with Self-Hosting!
Saving links and offline reading is dime a dozen nowadays, but the one BIG feature was recommended articles, which basically opened the reading list of the world and you could read extremely interesting longform articles based on your list. It was the best magazine you could imagine. But I guess it required maintenance and moderation so they axed it - in the typical fashion of an acquired product I might say.
I still wish for something like this with privacy in mind and community maintained.
I'm not sure what you're missing from all the existing discover features in other products, but NewsBlur has a feature that sounds like that. https://blog.newsblur.com/2025/02/02/discover-related-storie...
> the one BIG feature was recommended articles
The TWO BIG features were recommended articles and integration with IFTTT. I think, of the suggested alternatives, only Instapaper has IFTTT integration (modulo setting up a local webhook).
Given I have multiple things per day (and have for 10+ years) going into Pocket, this is going to be a big pain in the arse to deal with.
You could try Wallabag. It provides 3 separate RSS feeds per saved link status, that could trigger IFTT.
Ah, I'm talking about feeding -into- Pocket. I haven't found anything except Instapaper that has direct IFTTT actions for saving URLs or anything which natively supports a webhook kind of thing for saving (but I'm sure there must be something because it seems such an obvious thing to support!)
You might be able to scrape archive sites or create search queries that you use to determine fresh or trending archives or domains?
I think it's really hard to replicate the "people save this article for later" pedigree without actually having this information.
True, there are a lot of bots that use Internet Archive, which is probably the easiest to scrape. Maybe ask Jason Scott of Archive Team if he has any ideas for how to use IA and other archives for this purpose, and for ideas about how else to get this data?
I think Instapaper was another solution in this space that may have the info you want.
Maybe ask on some data hoarder subreddits about how to find new content that’s relevant to your interests with existing social proof?
I can see how the data from Pocket would have made that a lot easier for you, but finding a quick solution may be difficult. I think Apple News has a bit of social components around surfacing popular content, but that is not the same as user generated content indicating interest in a specific site, which is your goal.
Are you familiar with MetaFilter? There a community that might have some insight into your question, as they’re like HN but somewhat more crunchy and broadly less technical, but very human. Asking around other communities, you might find some suggestions.
Please let me know if you find a solution because this is an interesting problem, and I would probably be just as interested in the solution.
When Mozilla got Pocket, they advertised it all over Firefox to increase adoption. Back then, I was like "but I already have a bookmark feature". Over all these years I have hidden the Pocket button away because for most people there's no strong incentive to switch from a normal bookmarking solution (and now, with only a hand full of websites in major use, even bookmarks have lost all meaning).
Good riddance?
+1, my only interaction with Pocket is annoyance that I had to remove it from my toolbar every time I've installed Firefox on a new computer. Good riddance.
Mozilla fell into the trap of buying services and focusing all their efforts on integrating them without improving them. Mozilla needs to focus on their browser's UI. Nobody is going to buy into their ecosystem unless the browser is good. Arc Browser is the direction they need to go in. Firefox first got popular because its UI was radically better than anything else out there at the time.
Never heard of Fakespot, but Pocket is a loss. I don't use it as much anymore, but it was a very convenient way to keep my reading queue. I mean, honestly, it didn't really solve the problem for me completely, because I saved way more that I read, but at some point I relied on it heavily.
Fakespot is great. Basically tells you how many customer reviews are real vs bots. Helps with amazon purchases determining what is counterfeit vs real product
It's a shame, I have been a Pocket user for a long time and I use it daily with my Kobo e-reader now. It was also a little money from me every month for Mozilla, I use Firefox so I felt like it was worth it.
I started using Pocket in 2012 and have used it ever since (though I’ll obviously have to stop now). It was a great way to save interesting articles I didn’t have time to read right away. Naturally, I rarely got around to actually reading them, and the backlog kept growing. I just exported my data and found 13,000 unread articles out of a total of 34,000.
I can’t help but picture the Distracted Boyfriend meme, "reading my saved articles" vs "discovering new cool articles online to add to the ever-growing Pocket backlog, never to be read."
They bought pocket for at least 5 million, what a waste of money.
Pocket was revenue positive for a while, they probably still made money on it.
Compared to the other ways Mozilla has set money on fire while taking its eye off the ball, $5 million is immaterial really.
It's significantly less than the ceo salary, albeit the yearly one.
$5 million is pocket change.
No, it's Pocket change. Which could be better spent on the CEO's salary!
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...
Does anybody know a good service providing an API capable of categorizing URLs? I have a big collection of unsorted bookmarks I want to categorize by subject. I was planning to use Pocket for this. Is there any good alternative?
I feel bad saying I'm happy that they're shutting it down, but it should never have been built into the browser and forced on people.
Focus on making a decent browser and let extensions be extensions.
I used Pocket before Mozilla and in the early days of Mozilla ownership, but it was becoming less reliable by the day. I switched to SingleFile[1] and sync the dir between my tablet and laptop using Syncthing. No SaaS, everything stays on my network - works great.
This sucks :(
I've been using Pocket for I don't know how long. I use it every day during my commute to read articles from everywhere. I was planning on using it on my 3-week multi-country summer vacation this August to occupy me during all the country hopping I was about to do.
This is a Google Reader killing type event for me.
I'm going to go self-hosted next. I'm sick and tired of this crap.
I stopped[0] using RIL and Firefox almost at the same time - when it was "bundled". Kind of never returned. I wish RIL survived w/o getting bundled into Firefox or rather Firefox kept steadfast at browser work.
Later I also realised that for someone like me a RIL is like the IMDb Watchlist - never to be acted upon and just for accumulating even though I save bookmarks as well [1]. Now I add URLs to Reminders app as a TODO, when I have to do it; and I do it rarely but when I do I act on it (sooner).
[0] (Firefox use change: stopped as in from the "only browser anywhere" to maybe once in a week or few times a month usage on desktop").
[1] (Is there a bookmarking tool/app that triggers a Internet Archive save or checks whether it's saved upon "save bookmark" request?)
I'm strangely sad about this, even though this became yet another place for my bookmarks to go to die.
did anyone ever offer a method of detecting link rot in bookmarks automagically? i gave up on using bookmarks a very long time ago after finding so many links no longer working.
Not automatically but when you open a dead link you can ease the pain by using an extension such as "page archive" [1] to quickly search an archive such as the wayback machine and perhaps get something useful out of it.
I've always wished a browser such Firefox would extend bookmarks as an offline archive of all links you add to it. Your own personal wayback machine perhaps.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/
Mozilla continues to appear to not get the philosophies behind open source. If they really wanted to help people and not simply try to get market share and make money, they'd examine ways to make Pocket itself open source, including the server end of things.
"We're handing this over to a non-profit" would be nice.
Looks like much of it is. https://github.com/Pocket
Not sure how complete it is. But appears to have a typescript backend included.
I stopped using Pocket a long time ago when they started ruining the experience. When Omnivore shut down, I switched over to Raindrop.io. I now use it for bookmarking and built a simple cloud function to easily post links with a specific tag to a Daring Fireball-style link blog I host on Ghost. While Raindrop isn’t open source, it does offer useful browser extensions with features like highlights, notes, and tags—making it a handy tool for quickly blogging and / or bookmarking things I stumble across. I open sourced the cloud function.
I had submitted the Mozilla blog post about this and Fakespot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063930) but this submission seems to have received the traction. I added a comment to my submission pointing here.
Email the mods about this and they can cleanup and merge the dupes.
Well, there aren't any dupes. :-) But thanks.
I've always just used Instapaper. It feels weird to use a web service for something that feels like it should be local, though. I'm not sure I'm approaching this the right way.
Upon reading this at first I was like "Oh, crap!", but then after a minute I realized that I wasn't bother to export my saved articles... it was basically digital hoarding, for me, I think. While I did use it, I likely won't miss it.
Might save someone a few clicks: https://getpocket.com/export
I used and liked Pocket.
The main reason I stopped using it was that I found myself less often in offline spaces, which is when I used the reading part to catch up on interesting long articles.
Once planes, trains, countryside, foreign countries etc had good enough and/or cheap enough connectivity it mattered less to have offline reading material.
On the other side, competitors for those offline spots arose like Netflix letting you download episodes.
My dedicated ebook reader, which I had Pocket installed on, suffered similarly neglect. Phones got bigger and better enough.
I think this is good, I'd like to see more side projects that don't directly relate to the core web browser shutdown in favour of browser performance, compliance and feature parity.
I wonder how much ongoing cost this would endure for a solo developer.
I would be more than happy to sustain this if it's not too terrible.
How do i acquire this?
One issue I've had with read-it-later apps is that I end up accumulating far too many articles and never actually reading them. Now my approach is simple: if I see something I want to read, I either read it immediately or never.
There could be a better system (for me): a read-it-later app with a strict limit—say, 3 or 5 slots. If it's full and you add a new article, the oldest one gets automatically deleted to make room. That way, you always have something to read, but never feel overwhelmed by an endless backlog.
For me, this is just browser tabs. Modern browsers seem to do a good enough job with both persisting tab state between sessions and not expending tons of resources on idle tabs. So I just pop the article of interest up in a new tab and leave it there until I get back to it.
If you ever take a train (those where everyone has a seat) or flight, those are long hours perfect for reading.
So you are saying the articles I've been saving to "read later" for nearly a decade are never gonna get read?
Who'd have thunk?
It's a shame to hear Pocket is shutting down. Adding another option to the mix, I'd like to share my open-source project, "ato de yomu" (which means "read it later" in Japanese). https://atodeyomu.morishin.me/
You can save web pages to read later, track your reading history, and share your lists—or keep them private. It supports adding pages via the website, iOS Share Sheet, Chrome Extension, API call and etc.
It's open-source: https://github.com/morishin/atodeyomu.morishin.me
I previously shared it on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649998
Hope some of you find it a useful alternative!
I wonder if they’d be willing to sell it to the right group of folks. I’d love to have a community owned read it later service. Otherwise, we’re all on a never ending treadmill from one service to the next.
I have discovered so many things thanks to the Pocket home page.
Crap. My Kobo Libra supports Pocket as its only built-in way to get articles onto the device. I use GoodLinks to store links I like, and have a Shortcut that copies new articles from GoodLinks to Pocket. If I’m reading something interesting but long, I bookmark it, and that evening it’s on my ereader waiting for me.
It’s a nice setup. I’ll miss it. There’s not a great replacement, either. Even if I create a GoodLinks-to-epub pipe or something, now all those articles will be mixed in with my books and magazines. I don’t want to have to pick through a hundred random articles to find the next book I want to read.
Mozilla, hear me out: what if, just what it, you drop some of the AI stuff you’re blowing cash on that people who use Firefox often actively dislike? Could you shave a percent off that and use it to fund Pocket instead?
It says (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-l...) there is supposed to be an "Export HTML file" button, I only see export CSV file. Wrong documentation?
There should be a poison pill for these types of services that give the guy from Pinboard the first right of refusal.
The think I liked about pocket was the integration with my Kobo ebook reader. I could browse the web on my phone or laptop and "add to pocket" for later, then could fire up my ereader and read the articles formatted nicely on my epaper screen.
Would be nice if Kobo supported some other service, but a bit of a stretch to imagine they'd support something self hosted or an open standard for such things
Kobo supports ReadWise I think.
Damn, this one really hurts.
I've been a massive user since Read It Later. I used to get year-in-review emails telling me I was in the top 1% of users. For a period of several years, I read an astounding amount via Pocket. It is very tightly intertwined with my time on HN, as most headlines I'm interested in get immediately saved to Pocket.
My usage dropped a lot when I stopped commuting via the subway (where offline was critical), and a lot of my media consumption switched to podcasts, over time. I always thought Pocket could have gone multimedia, and in a world in which they supported podcasts, I would have loved to have everything in one spot. Newsletters, too.
But, I'm not surprised that the end has come, considering they stayed in their lane. Also, if the Google default search gravy train is about to disappear, this is one of the consequences. The idea that Tab Groups are a replacement is laughable.
I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could live on as a community project?
Your experience and mine is almost exactly the same, down to the subway being the place where I used Pocket the most.
given mozilla makes a fantastic email client - thunderbird - you would think they would have made pocket multimedia but alas
I use pocket all the time to save articles to read on my kobo, which has a pretty good first-party integration in the OS.
I wonder what Rakuten are going to do.
Same and it's my favourite Kobo feature. I hope Mozilla releases Pocket source code for people willing to self-host it. Kobos are highly hackable and I'm sure the community will find a way to change getpocket.com domain in the built-in Pocket app, even if Rakuten chooses not to provide this option.
I'm not one for external services piggybacked onto other software, but the ability to quickly send something to my Kobo has been a godsend.
edit: I had no idea Mozilla actually bought Pocket. Mental that they're willing to shut it down
I wonder if Rakuten can buy pocket from mozilla, their integration is so good
This made me sad because I served my need so well. Now I will have to think about alternatives. I wish they could open-source it.
Pocket and other similar services always ended up becoming a virtual junk drawer for me, as I was just hoarding content to consume when I have free time, but time never realyl freed itself up and content just kept pilling in. In the end, it just became one of those annoying things that I have to disable on a new installation of Firefox.
I used the mediocre TTS to listen to text articles while driving.
switched from Pocket to Readwise Reader last year, haven’t looked back. It’s a paid app ($10/month) but totally worth it IMO
I remember using Pocket briefly and wondering what the purpose of it was when you could just save bookmarks in any stock web browser.
Another feature no one asked for, meeting its technological grave. For those few users of Pocket this function could have been easily handled as an extension.
If Mozilla spent the engineering hours wasted on this toward fixing the ever growing mountain of existing bugs they might have more than 1% market share.
Firefox has the "killer app" for modern browsers--ublock origin.
I am dismayed by how much money Mozilla spends on things other than the browser, though.
Ad blocking should just be an integral browser feature at this point, as in Brave or Vivaldi.
Why can't Mozilla open source Pocket?
I've used Pocket in combination with the In My Pocket add-on for a very long time on a daily basis. I don't particularly care about the online specific features, I don't care about syncing, or any of that. I've used Pocket specifically as a better and quicker Bookmarking tool than the browser's default to save pages I want to read later, simple as that and it worked flawlessly.
Now I'm forced to find something similar, and I found Save-to-Read which does mostly what I need, although it feels a bit jankier.
I understand why people have hated this app for a very long time and blamed Mozilla for investing into it, but to me it has always had value by doing what tools were meant to do, make my life easier, even if that's just about saving a few clicks every time I wanted to save a page or dismiss it.
There are so many great non-browser read-it-later bookmarking solutions these days. There open-source self hosted solutions as well as many free/paid hosted solutions with generous free plans, with some pretty advanced paid features. Pocket has stagnated for a decade except for a poorly thought through UX redesign. The paid plan has almost nothing to offer except ereader integration, and there is a handful of others that offer that these days.
My specific need is I like to reference articles I've read later, quickly. I was using Pocket to track links to articles I've read, keeping them categorized with tags. It's been a mediocre solution for this need (e.g. I'd like to add more metadata, such as notes), but I haven't found too many apps/products that serve this use case.
What's nice about Pocket is that I can do this from any browser on any device, since it has integrations and an app for mobile devices. Trying to do this with a note taking app is much more clunky and frictional. Especially when trying to quickly find an article I had saved.
Anyway, if anyone knows something that fits this use case better, it looks like I'm in the market for it now
Have you looked at larder.io?
Browser integrations, tags and search works fine, but the notes functionality (“Description”) is very limited.
So what did this do?
The comments lead me to believe it was an extension or application for saving web pages in a more readable form for a personal archive type thing.
However the obituary mentions curation and an editorial team.
Did they select the info for you or it was your own choice?
It's not important what it is. Pocket was bought overpriced by Mozillas incompetent officers on a project to diversify their income by playing VC. They then decided to piss all over their Firefox browser users by forcefully integrating it with the browser. It was a terrible decision, a terrible business, and now way past its best by date its finally taken out to pasture. Sadly the incompetent officers continue their tenure and soon we'll write this obituary for Mozilla, as their C-level compensation inevitably outstrips what Google is willing to pay for a 1% market share and declining browser.
I know that, I want to determine the level of incompetence.
A page saving service is one thing, adding a curation/discovery team (paid by the subscriptions or by the sites who want to get on that curated list?) on top of that is another.
A bunch of alternatives were already mentioned. If you’re looking for an rss feed reader that can also save links directly, Lighthouse[1] may be an option.
Pocket had already been wokified, one of the main categories of trending news right at the top was some diversity category of sorts. Couldn't get rid of it.
Seemed like it was on life support anyway.
This might be a more manual solution for Kobo imports, but I've taken to saving pages of interest via Joplin's web clipper extension. Pages can be saved as Markdown, HTML, screenshot, or URL. If I save the Markdown version (typically looks fine), it will have also saved linked images. Exporting that to another folder gives me something that I can convert to epub, using Pandoc. From there, it's trivial to copy over to my Kobo as before. Of course, this already would have been readable on my phone, since my notebooks also sync across devices.
IIRC they promised to make Pocket open source, but I'm not sure if the back end ever was. Does anyone know if this is the case?
Seems like a big win for Instapaper, who will likely pick up a lot of Pocket's abandoned users.
> But the way people use the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs
Wasn't Pocket always trying to resist bad web trends? If I recall, they had a tool that would clean up webpages and remove all the junk so you can just focus on the article contents. And they were also trying to save the concept of bookmarking from complete irrelevance. I guess it's understandable that users didn't care, it was an uphill battle for non-power users, and power uses didn't like the sponsored articles and already had their bookmarks saved outside of Pocket.
I was a premium user of pocket for almost a decade before mozilla bought it and I remained a user for another few years after the acquisition. Mozilla turned it into garbage that didn't even do it's job properly and it is a bit sad to see it shut down.
While the Kobo app is still available an alternative might be:
Self-Host Omnivore: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/blob/main/self-host...
Use this proxy to point to the Self-Hosted instance to pull from Omnivore Instead. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter
This is what I've been doing for a year or so now. I hope they don't remove the Kobo integration code from my Kobo.
Isn’t Omnivore discontinued? I didn’t hear what happened when they joined ElevenLabs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41985118
Apparently the community is trying to shape the project into a workable self-hosted state. Ironic post from two months ago about a user trying to migrate away from Pocket to Omnivore:
https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/4550
Same community users provide crowdsourced list of open source alternatives to Omnivore:
This really hurts. All my content consumption workflow depends on Pocket, I shortlist from my rss reader (inoreader) directly into pocket, then ot gets synced with readwise reader automatically where I listen to the chosen articles [1]. I also use my pocket account's archive as a collection of the articles and writings I have liked (planning to build a personal and simple content recommendation system for myself). [1] https://saeedesmaili.com/posts/my-content-consumption-workfl...
What are you going to replace it with?
Not sure yet. Since I'm already paying for readwise, I might use that, but then sharing from inoreader to readwise will be multiple steps instead of the current built in pocket integration I use. I should also make sure I'm keeping a local archive of read and unread stuff just in case. I'll also contact inoreader to see if they will replace their built-in pocket integration with anything else.
I have never relied on a browser for "favorites" or "bookmarks"
I keep these links in a separate org-mode file, but honestly a spreadsheet or even a text file would be fine for that too.
Why does everything have to be complicated?
Can we get a list going of the best substitutes and the pros/cons? Thanks.
They were told it was a mistake to buy it, they didn't listen, like they never listen. I used to love the organization but it's so resistant to outside input that I had to leave the community about 12 years ago.
So they have been ignoring all feature requests and bug reports to Firefox's "bookmarks", directing users to Pocket. All the while also gutting and eventually shutting down Pocket.
Where do I go to have basic bookmarking functionality in my web browser? Tags for example, will those ever work on mobile? Keywords? Can I even search for a bookmark on mobile (not to go there, but to find its location in my bookmark folders, and edit it)?
We shut down a service called teamgum about 10 Years ago. Our service was priced 0 initially and had huge number of users. It was meant to share articles amongst a team and later on Google search show articles already discovered by colleagues which can be helpful. I remember Tucker m pocket was around then or was just launched.
I abandoned Pocket a while ago. I believe the offline mode was unreliable. Instapaper has been a really good replacement for me. My use case is to queue up articles to read on my iPad without distractions.
I've used Pocket from back when they were called "Read it later" and have saved just shy of 30k articles. They've gotten worse recently, but when I tried other apps (instapaper, getmatter, raindrop, paperspan, omnivore) they all had their own issues. Now I have to give those apps another try...
Try Reader from Readwise. It's a great multi platform app which supports all kinds of reading mediums and can save articles, tweets, YouTube videos etc. It's a paid app, but well worth it. Look for comment from tristanho, the founder, below.
I migrated all my pocket saves to a self-hosted Karakeep (previously Hoarder) instance a few months ago. No issues with the import and I’ve been happy with using it thus far.
I'll miss it dearly. I use it to sync articles to kobo, almost daily. I don't even knew they were thinking on pulling the plug. I don't know of any alternatives. I'll be happy to self host if I can sync with kobo.
Truth be told, my relationship with Pocket has dipped significantly over the years. According to my email, I signed up for Read It Later in March of 2011, which coincided with the release of their Android beta. It was the first thing I installed on every new browser or phone, and for many years, my end of the year recap had me at the top 1% of readers.
I'm not sure if I changed, the web did, or what, but I'm not sure I've saved anything to Pocket in 2025, and probably just a handful in 2024.
But still, to Nate and the Read it Later/Pocket team. Thank you.
Can someone explain what this means?
>Focusing on what powers better browsing We acquired Fakespot in 2023 to help people navigate unreliable product reviews using AI and privacy-first tech. While the idea resonated, it didn’t fit a model we could sustain.
Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved,
Did Fakespot own pocket? I still use fakespot as an additional marker in my research of purchases.
Mozilla owns Fakespot. Fakepost is pretty unreliable and assigning a score to something so difficult to rank isn't a great model.
Online product reviews are all fake. That's close enougth to the truth that you really don't need Fakespot.
I'll always remember finding that Pocket had exposed their Redux dev tools to production and they had a "dev panel" you could open that allowed you to bypass all the payment walls (for example switching fonts, layouts, etc). Never used Pocket though, so it didn't do much for me besides being fun to find.
I you looking for an alternative, Flus[1] from FreshRss creator Marien Fressinaud is great and FOSS !
Pocket was very convenient to send random articles to my Kobo, which comes with a Pocket integration. Great for reading long blog posts and such, easier on the eyes. Will miss it.
I was using Pocket to save articles to listen to in the car, with their ok TTS feature. Does anyone know of an easy solution that allows me to click to save an article, and then have it automatically on an app on my phone so I can listen while I drive?
Dang, like many others I use Pocket extensively - especially with my Kobo e-reader. This is very sad!
I wrote this Deno script to convert the CSV export to a Netscape Bookmark File Format-compatible HTML-file so that it can be imported to Linkding. Hope it's useful for someone else too! https://github.com/enjikaka/pocket-to-bookmark
Well, crap. I've had a Pocket account for more than ten years. It's a key feature on my Kobo devices, to boot.
I hope Kobo manages to find some alternative provider for similar functionality, rather than just dropping it altogether.
EDIT: Oh, and worth noting that this product will officially die before Mozilla fulfills its promise to open source it, back when they acquired Pocket. Thanks, guys.
I use KOReader [1] on my Kobo. It supports Wallabag [2]. Wallabag offers both hosted [3] and self-hosted options. There's also a standalone kobo client for Wallabag [4]. In addition, Wallabag also supports direct import from Pocket.
Thanks, just set it up via koreader that I already had installed.
Any opinion on using wallabako vs koreader? koreader might involve some more steps to sync it looks like?
It has been a while since I used Wallabag on KOReader and I have no experience using wallabako (that project wasn't around when I tried Wallabag). But seeing that you're already using KOReader, I don't expect either of them to present a challenge to you. As far as I remember, using Wallabag on KOReader, including sync was simple enough.
The only issue I have with Wallabag is that it reduces the battery supported time significantly. This isn't a big issue in my case, but a longer backup would be nice. However, others have reported that they don't suffer the problem to the same magnitude. Perhaps wallabako can reduce that power usage when KOReader can be exited.
This is amazing. Thank you!
Pocket has pretty much exclusively been a, “send article to Kobo” button for me thanks to the integration.
I doubt my now-ancient Aura One will be getting a firmware update to replace Pocket, unfortunately. Might be time to either look at alternative firmwares or see if Rakuten does trade-ins on newer models.
Such a shame and wasted potential. Mozilla could have turned Pocket into a read it later + RSS reader killer combo that would have closed the browsing loop across the web on Firefox. But they slept on it, actively worsening it and finally putting it out of its misery. This is an end of an era and it has such a chime of finality to it.
> This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs...
I wish they had closed this announcement with more optimism.
Sort of peculiar that a company that is based on and makes open source software wouldn't wind down Pocket as a product but release it to the community. I don't have any particular wish to use it--I moved on years ago--but it's odd at a sort of ethical level that Mozilla, of all companies, would disappear software.
Wait.. all that stuff I put into Pocket to look at later (and never revisited) may be gone forever?
So, I have a ton of links in pocket. Any suggestions on where to move them to?
This feels like yet another wake up call to only use open source software.
Release starts by aggressively stating that
> Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire
but they acquired Pocket in 2017 [1] and neither this app was growing (despite market for such apps was in very good shape few years ago) or it was delightful addition to browser experience
that said what annoys me about Mozilla, is that while they are position themselves poor and underfunded, they still act like they are backed by billionaire: they buy random apps for no reason or donating tons of money to not tech-related political organizations [2]
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-po...
Seems Obsidian Web Clipper is a good alternative, it can save as markdown so you own the data offline. Anyone tried it? What is your experience?
It isn't available on mobile AFAIK, which is like my primary use for pocket etc., saving links to later read on my laptop
Obsidian Web Clipper is available on all mobile browsers that support extensions including Safari, Firefox, and some forks of Chrome
https://apps.apple.com/app/obsidian-web-clipper/id6720708363...
Alternative is using iOS share with Obsidian.
I use it pretty extensively. Aside from being a pretty poor experience on mobile (it straight up can't be used on iOS at all, works ok on Android), it's the best web clipper I've used.
I really wish they would integrate the functionality into Obsidian itself, though I think there are technical limitations with it.
I literally just used Obsidian Web Clipper on iOS+Safari.
I haven't tried it, but I have used Notion Web Clipper. It works, but the experience is nowhere near the same.
Replying to deleted comment by jsheard:
> Mozilla never did reveal how much they paid for Pocket, did they?
They raised a series B for $5M if that helps ballpark it for you.
I tried saving named links in a text file, offline reading in Wallabag, full archiving with Archivebox, and fancier bookmarking/tagging with Karakeep. I found each does a bit of what I want so I now use all four. Heh
My little side project has been chugging along for those looking for (harder to use) variation of Pocket.
The main advantage is that content recommendations based on previously saved content are pretty good, especially for tech oriented crowd.
This is actually promising, kudos!
AI tagging feature like those in Pocket and Karakeep, in the first place, seems helpful. But months later, you will get lots of tags to handle. Content recommendation, especially if that only consider what we saved, can replace the tagging things I guess. I wonder how do you do this for free, though.
Also your HN/Reddit integration is what I'm looking for. The way I save things from HN so far in Karakeep is that I save the main article and add the HN url manually to the note.
(shameless plug)
I didn’t like Pocket, so I worked on my own link archiver years ago [0].
UI inspired by HN, a list of links you saved + tags filtering. Plain and simple, less features but does the job for me. I’m actually looking for users to try it out as I have not yet publicized it that much.
[0]: https://ulry.app
I for one welcome the pocket interface no longer being installed by default. If I want (pocket|AI|news|recommendations|smart .*) in my browser, I'll install it myself, and choose which one I want if there are several options available.
(This is not firefox specific but several browsers in my country have a deal with a news site I don't care for, and on Edge mobile it's the only option in a list of news sources to choose from besides turning the thing off. Think "Fox News" and you're pretty close. Thanks but no thanks for reminding me as an immigrant that there's too many of us.)
We have been working on Full Sort for a while now. Lots of features to be a contender but not bloated either. Take a look at https://fullsort.com.
Demo without signup. Upon signup the service is free. Not mining your data either.
Backflip to Delicious to Pocket.
Why isn’t there a simple bookmarking solution that can survive technology shifts?
Wait what? They own Fakespot and they're shutting it down?
First thing I did after getting the csv export was throw together a python script to save all the URLs as PDFs based on the title. Not horribly robust, but a csv list of failed URLs will be ready when I wake up in the morning.
Why not try sell Pocket instead of shutting it down? Seems like such a waste
Glad back in the days I chose Instapaper and not Readitlater/Pocket. Still using it all the time. It costs money but is worth it.
Finally, it was so annoying in my browser
I have been using Pocket + p2k for long articles that I prefer to read on Kindle. There are several issues with the setup, but this works well enough for most articles that I have sticked to it over the years. Looks like I have to find an alternative now.
I've been using wallabag for a while, switched to Pocket for this exact reason. Maybe switching back is the answer to this? Looked around a bit, someone seems to have thought about this already.
I’ve been having trouble with Pocket’s offline mode and TTS feature for a while, and just migrated (yesterday!) to Obsidian via Obsidian Web Clipper (automated using Pupeteer).
Obsidian doesn’t have all the features necessary for a read-it-later app, but almost!
Obsidian is phenomenal. I only wish it were open source so I could self-host it. Sometimes I worry that they'd sell my notes data to advertisers.
Obsidian cannot access your notes even if you use the Sync service (it's end-to-end encrypted)
> Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.
The link to "more info" links to a page with this exact same vague text...
I've never used Pocket, so I can't comment on feature parity, but for people looking for an alternative I've been using Instapaper for years and have been very happy with it. The founders recently bought it back from Pinterest and have been making steady improvements.
Pinterest sold it in 2018. The founder is Marco Arment, he's not the one who bought it back.
But yes, instapaper is still alive.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/instapaper-is-leaving-pint...
Ah, OK - I must have misread the bit about who bought it from Pinterest.
It's me. For what it's worth I was involved with Instapaper at betaworks (after Marco sold it to betaworks), and Pinterest sold it back to me. Been 12 years with it now!
I'll take it off their hands.
Do not try to compete with pinboard.
Is there anything (preferabbly local-first, and sync with dropbox or any other service) that simply snips the article (preferably using simlar tech as "reader mode"), and something that supports other media? (youtube videos, instagram reels, etc)
I used to use Pocket religiously but fell off sometime after they pushed a redesign that made it more difficult to use. I've been using Inoreader to save articles now.
Mozilla should shut down.
I was a very heavy pocket user and loved it, but around 2019 they changed their Discover tab, so you could no longer see the source of the article.
The pages were listed as ‘Pocket’ source, and they windowed the original article in a pocket page with ads
Pocket's existing featureset kind of overlaps with Pinboard. Maybe can Pinboard jump in and buy it from Mozilla? or build an alternative, perhaps.
What's the useful part of Pocket's feature set that doesn't overlap with Pinboard?
Products going away is saddening and maddening but if there’s demand surely these good ideas should be fought over.
What’s going on for the market not to stably fill this gap? Is there no workable price point?
Don’t have time to read this so I saved it in Pocket, I’ll probably get to it in a few months…
But in all seriousness I’ve got about 1000 articles I need to store and browse…somewhere when Pocket EoLs
I've never understood Pocket. What's wrong with Zotero?
Huh, that’s annoying. Been using pocket since around 2008, mainly for when I was abroad and roaming was costly. Looks like I’ll need to export my library of stuff.
Do I have any other similar options?
Can someone suggest a good bookmarking app that can be used offline, as well as great typography and neat bookmarking of social media videos? Absolutely. At least embed and show it correctly.
You all thought Mozilla wouldn't take a feature or service away.. Seriously where have you absolute fucks been the past 13 years?
-Tobin
I'd love for everyone to move to https://histre.com/ :-) (which I built)
Any good alternatives which can import my pocket data?
Readwise Reader should be a great option
oh, this wasn't actually what I wanted to link to. I had this one in mind: https://www.linkace.org/
I moved off Pocket a couple years ago and moved to Readwise which is great (paid was a desired feature).
Anyone else have a favorite alternative?
I still use Firefox but if Ladybird and Servo get adblock, video download, dark mode, I am jumping ship.
A read-it-later app. Pocket, you had one job. Just one job. And for a while that was my killer app on mobile. But, as we see, the enshitification of the web continues.
"What began as a read-it-later app evolved into something much bigger. After Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017, we invested in building our content curation and recommendation capabilities so people everywhere can discover and access high quality web content. While Pocket is shutting down, we will continue to invest in this promise—through the New Tab experience, our email newsletter, and more."
I use it to collect articles for my newsletter. Any alternatives? (Free, Browser extension, API)
Raindrop: https://raindrop.io/
Thanks!
How can we export the backups from premium version? Let me guess—we can only export the URLs.
Indeed:
I guess I'll have to write a scraper to download the permanent copies?title,url,time_added,tags,statusI'm screwed because many of the articles in my pocket no longer exist.
I guess good that i never used it and it was the first thing to disable from policies.json
> Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire
What does this mean? Which billionaires back Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Edge?
So much wasted potential, I was a top 1% reader for a couple years (mostly because I saved a lot of things probably); it was a convenient way to save articles and references in multiple devices but at the end I was frustated it was so cumberstone to keep links organized.
I stopped paying premium and migrated to a self-hosted Wallabag, which doesn't have all the features I want but hey, in hindsight it was the right decision.
It would be cool if they open sourced the code, but one can only dream.
Pocket has 85 public repositotories. If it's possible to host the entire thing, I bet it isn't simple. https://github.com/Pocket/
Damn, what alternative can we look for ? (free, ideally open source)
Just in time for them to shove more crypto and ai into a bloody web browser...
Good. Less dependence on external servers.
Now for better local bookmarks.
This is sad! I use it daily. Not sure what tool to replace this with.
To be honest I don't think fakespot can work anymore, only the most egregious uses of AI can be detected these days... a couple sentences in a prompt can make it undetectable, especially considering they're a third party with limited access to behavior heuristics of amazon users
Damn, I'm a user and sad about this. Whats alternative?
I am worried about Firefox Sync now, hope it survives
One of many things they introduced that I would put repeated effort in to get out of my interface.
Let a thousand flowers bloom
Have been using FF since early 2000's. Tried using Pocket but never really got the hang of it. Just never felt that it fixed a problem was having.
Still a FF fanboi, but fully behind shutting anything down that detracts from core FF.
Maybe old school, but would much prefer a focus on a browser focused on privecy.
Good riddance.
I never used it as I knew it would eventually be canned.
Another day, yet another service that I used shut down. It does make one want to get better at programming and build one's own solutions since these multi-million and billion dollar companies are more concerned with shareholder value than their users.
Seems like very short notice!
So disappointed. I had such high hopes when Mozilla acquired them, specifically for the integration with Firefox.
However, for years the design has been going the completely opposite direction of what I expected. The focus on more random content instead of my own articles is not what I wanted to see.
Pocket is probably one of my oldest online accounts. I'll be sad to see it go but I guess it was already kind of dead for a few years now.
Amazing opportunity here for a really simple and focused read later app to take the reigns.
I've got years of saved articles in there and the export situation is pretty bad. It only gives you the URLs, not the actual content. So if a site goes down (which happens all the time), you're basically screwed.
I'm thinking about throwing Claude Code at this problem and building a proper exporter that actually saves the content.
Pocket was always completely incompatible with Mozilla/Firefox, and is at this point hopelessly outdated compared to all competitors. I really don't understand what they were thinking.
Just running a hosted version of the excellent and open source (both server and client) Omnivore would be an amazing service to the open web and for data archiving/portability, but I'm not holding my breath.
Annoying, I used this. It seems self-hosted wallabag might be the way to go.
Perhaps cheaper? https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/wiki/wallabag-ecosystem...
This hurts. I used pocket as a "read later" or "will not read now" tool.
I think a smarter move in this context is to pass the product (even much simplified) to a company that can maintain it.
What is a good alternative?
Readwise Reader, paid service from a bootstrapped company, kind of ensures it won’t randomly kill the product
Also: They are users of their own product
~90% of HN commenters who mentioned Pocket in the last decade or so have been complaining about Mozilla's wasted effort on Pocket and how no one asked for it and how it was just another Mozilla "scam" and now that it's being removed, ~90% of the comments are "sad" and "I used it a lot."
This is a perfectly reasonable distribution once you consider that only a small fraction of people who really care about something are motivated enough to comment about it.
There's a small group who complain loudly about Pocket, a small group who are really sad to see it go, and probably a much larger group that either doesn't know what Pocket is or doesn't care enough to write a comment.
It's important to keep this in mind when reading online discussions in general.
This.
I'm in the "didn't really care either way" camp. Pocket was not something interesting or useful to me, but I could remove it from the UI so its existence also wasn't annoying to me.
~99% of comments like this continue to fail to realize the simple fact that there is no contradiction in different people having different opinions.
And if you're keeping stats, try to find at least 1% of "hypocrites" who claimed it was a "scam", but are now "sad"
The two opinions aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
I used and enjoyed Pocket, but never paid a dime for it so I can’t imagine that Mozilla made much if any money off of me. That’s probably true for most users, and as such it’s not difficult to imagine that Pocket ended up being a bad purchase for Mozilla in terms of diversifying income.
> I used and enjoyed Pocket, but never paid a dime for it
I did subscribe to Pocket Premium for a while but it wasn't really worth the money (plus they were being arseholes when I was asked for API support.)
I went out of my way to disable it in about:config in the 3 different booleans I needed to do that. But dancing on the grave of something is meh.
I recommend Readwise.
Yeah, at first, I was worried, as I have a lot of stuff in Pocket. Then I realized I already had it synced with Readwise Reader.
I don't have to do a thing.
>Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire and our independence shapes everything we build
This doesn't sound accurate
I was an avid Firefox user and supporter pre-1.0, even before it was named "Firefox". I used Pocket a lot, its history is part of my. It's time for Mozilla to die. That'll suck, but it's the only way forward. Way too many bad decisions in the last 10 years.
Fuck you, Mozilla.
The writing was on the wall for Pocket when paywalls started to go up everywhere a few years ago. By that point, it could no longer scrape articles reliably.
Before that, it's Discovery feature was great for surfacing long form writing on the Net, but even then there were issues because they'd pull a lot of content mill slop from Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and there was no real way to block domains. Finally, when the good "new media" outlets started shutting down, Pocket's content library went down with it.
This is disappointing news. The Save to Pocket feature was one of the core features of Firefox that kept me using it. It feels like Mozilla is circling the drain lately.
It would probably make more sense to link to the blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/building-whats-next/
Also, it's not just Pocket, it's also Fakespot, which I didn't even know existed.
Oh no, what happened? Oh no, how terrible! That's just awful, how terrible oh no! [1]
It is a time to rejoice and celebrate, for a product that never should have existed has died today.
This follows the long history of projects like Google+ and hopefully others like Facebook Watch will follow soon.
Seems odd that it's not being sold off. Was it truly that worthless?
It was also a great way to read paywalled articles for free.
I've been using FF since it was Mozilla Phoenix and I never once tried Pocket.
So Mozilla is shutting down Pocket completely by July, and this is under their new CEO Laura Chambers who took over in February 2024. Meanwhile Mitchell Baker - who was pulling in $6.9M by 2022 - just bailed out entirely this February after "focusing on AI and internet safety" for exactly one year.
Let me get this straight: Baker's salary went from $2.4M in 2018 to nearly $7M in 2022, while browser share collapsed to 3.45%. During that time she laid off 320 employees (70 in Jan 2020, 250 in Aug 2020), claiming COVID despite record revenues in 2019. Then she steps down as CEO to "focus on AI," only to quit Mozilla entirely a year later.
Now the new CEO's brilliant strategy is to kill off Pocket - one of the few products people actually used that they acquired in 2017. Eight years of "investment" down the drain.
This is exactly what I mean when I say Mozilla has no fucking clue what they're doing. They're completely dependent on Google's search money, executives are getting rich while laying off workers, and their response to irrelevance is to shut down working products. The whole organization feels like it exists just so Google can point to it and say "we're not a monopoly."
Self-hosted alternatives: Karakeep and Linkwarden
One less thing to disable and hide on every new installation is a win.
Check out LibreWolf and see if its defaults come closer to what you want. For me, it's better. I still have to modify a few settings, but not nearly as many as with vanilla Firefox.
that's what I thought. I was against the integration and had to make efforts ever since that inappropriate cash-grab. Glad to see it's dead.
I wish Mozilla would find the funding to stick to being a good browser rather than this current phenomena of waiting to see what the next shitty thing they do to the software is.
There's no money in being a good browser and a minority will scream at any attempt for Mozilla to make money other than donations.
Yay!
They are also shuttering Fakespot which they acquired for an untold amount of money in 2023. Sounds like this little attempt at being "AI guardrails" is over.
These fucking guys. Open source it.
Lmao.
I'm sorry, but lmao.
Mozilla just cannot get out of their own way. All we want is a good open fucking browser not dominated by a corporation, and they can't stop distracting themselves with things that don't matter and then eventually shutting them down.
Mozilla needs to clean house of their leadership. Burn it all down. Start from scratch. It's a joke right now...and I say that as a daily user of Firefox and someone that desperately wants them to succeed.
SOMEONE needs to be held accountable for failures like this...but all we will get is vague half apologies and corporate bullshit.
A deserved fart down your throat is what you get
Terrible and predictable. Saw it coming years ago, and have used Wallabag ever since.
Sad to see Pocket shutting down. For anyone seeking alternatives, I've been working on Linkwarden[1], an open-source bookmark manager that hit HN's front page twice[2][3]. Plenty of other great alternatives out there too, such as Raindrop (not fully open-source), Karakeep, and Wallabag.
Also, there's an official Linkwarden mobile app in development, aiming to support most (if not all) of Pocket's key features :)
wow, i did not see this coming!
/s
But i think (hope) this is a good thing. Mozilla has been too distracted and needs to get their head in the game.
Pocket users in shambles until they realize Ctrl + D exists
Are they going to refund money to Premium users who recently subscribed or renewed?
EDIT: As pointed out below, it's covered in the link.
"On July 8, 2025, Annual subscriptions will be cancelled and Annual users will receive a prorated refund automatically to the original payment method."
That is covered in the link.
