Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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.

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)

> every other browser

You can just say Chromium

Safari exists, and is quite popular.

Safari only exist on Apple devices, and generally had even less features than Firefox.

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.

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?

Not sure how this contradicts the fact that Safari is quite popular.

Going purely by (mis)feature count, I'd say they're pretty similar:

https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+136,safari+18.5,firefox+...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

the internet is no longer designed to be readable.

it is designed to be profitable.

they really went out of their way to include as many "Why" sections and links as possible without saying a single word about why.

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.

Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform.

Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

> 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?

How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?

For users it’s called “putting all your eggs in one basket”

Apple devices make up over half of all visitors in some markets/segments.

Update: Downvoted for facts, stay classy, HN!

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.

And Thunderbird?

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.

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.

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.

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.

you can blur the background now at OS level on macOS from the menu bar.

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.

> I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration

And blockchain integration after that.

> 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.

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

Devs like WebKit because it's easy to integrate in non-browsers.

I switched to Vivaldi after 23 years of Mozilla. Could not be happier.

> 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-Build

WebKit also exists on Linux, albeit not as good as on Darwin.

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.

All my hopes are with Ladybird now

>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.

Have you forgotten Apple and WebKit?

Its also no longer designed for users, but for the advertisers and bots.

What's your other theory? ;-)

> 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...

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

+1. That was readbait :) (just joking, it actually was an interesting comment to read)

So what? For many people, having to buy new hardware to use it means it isn't a viable alternative browser.

Outlook is Electron slop now? Jesus christ.

It's owned by a chinese company and uses Chromium

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.

It was officially announced late February/early March I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43302073

Like for desktop apps? I guess this differs fundamentally from Chromium in that... you do not run the "entire" browser like in Electron?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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...

How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.

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.

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.

Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

thanks, guys.

i googled:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)

BRICS is a cancer on par with Google.

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!

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

WebKit 100% exists on Windows and Linux, Microsoft builds it under the playwright project.

I use it occasionally, only for debugging purposes though.

> 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.

> 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...

mozilla has been broken for a long time. spiritually and intellectually, brave is the successor

...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.

And 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.

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.

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.

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#... )

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.

Ladybird is moving to Swift IIRC?

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.

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.

Ah, Firefox, the overly attached browser: https://bug1791524.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9295...

(From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524)

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.

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.

I believe you are correct: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

That makes me very angry. I am fat, wasteful, and directionless but Google pays me nothing.

I bought a car a couple years ago. It advertised am/fm radio in the feature sheet

Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.

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

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.

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.

Maybe https://pinboard.in? I haven't used it, but it tempts me a few times per decade.

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.

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?

So in market terms, you are infinitely more efficient!

There is no way for anyone to get Mozilla to change because the current board picks new board members.

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

Ugh. This sounds so horrible, but this is probably the truest statement on this entire page.

> 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 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.

I mean… Phoenix was the original code name for Firefox, so maybe it was just foreshadowing.

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...

Is Google your default search engine? If so, you should send them an invoice. :)

According to caniuse, it's a proprietary implementation that's only partially implemented [1].

[1]: https://caniuse.com/picture-in-picture

It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit

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.

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:

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.

> 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].

[1]: https://mycodelesswebsite.com/safari-statistics/

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

Thank you!

I thought that electron == chrome

Surman same problematic "leadership" type.

What was the theory!!! I had to read your comment twice looking for it, only to realize that there was no theory in there!

From what I understand, Brave is a shit-show in its' own right.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I recently started using wallabag. Seems to do the job decently

Last I checked they have some money from the Yahoo settlement. But nowhere near something they can use to operate in perpetuity.

> 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.

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.

> 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!).

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.

That doesn't sound like she and her fattened board were ousted at all.

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.

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.

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.

I think it was that people stopped using Pocket because the search was so bad.

Rain.drop is Russian, isn't it?

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.

> Mozilla must die, so Firefox can live.

The day that happens, the only thing we are left with is Chrome..

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...

Just pgsql is enough. Even a chache db or sqlite do full text search

> 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.)

I read the parent post as meaning 'wheels!' being front and centre of the brochure.

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

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).

The maintainer of Raindrop is from Kazakhstan

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 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?

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.

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...

To be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised. Thanks for the info.

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.

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.

https://imgur.com/a/OLD9EiI

> 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.

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.

Mozilla ≠ firefox

>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

> 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.

Who is going to fund Firefox if not Mozilla? Maybe a new organization can pop up or maybe a new one won't.

same here! we're dating ourselves... xD

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.

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...

> 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.

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?

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.

It's so fantastic that it can't even open Outlook .msg files. It boggles the mind

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.

Brave is adware, in what way is it the spiritual successor to Firefox?

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...

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.

I guess what we need is a non-profit fork of Firefox that takes donations directly and focuses only on the browser.

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...

> …that are available in every other browser

where “every other browser” == Chrome.

Otherwise, agreed.

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.

An ad-ware reskin of chromium is the successor of Firefox?

I use Brave and it's totally fine. People love to complain about it on HN but I have never had any bad experiences.

> 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.

> 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...

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.

what about things like the browser object in Qt/PyQt?

> 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 )

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.

That was when del.icio.us was still alive

Brave's adblocker won't do anything against Google's trackers if Google builds it in to the engine.

Again, I advise against trusting anything Chromium-based.

Also, you apparently haven't heard of uBlock Origin's Medium Mode. Brave can't even touch that. There's more than just advertising to worry about on the web.

Thunderbird search is bad enough that I just open up the Gmail website to find an email. At this point I don't even know why I use a local email client, except maybe 25 years of muscle memory.

You're absolutely right.

See, now "local repository search" is one of those things that you would think that somebody would use one of the LLMs for.

Alas, that would be "useful" but not Unicorn Lottery Ticket Useful and so will never get implemented.

Apologies if I'm missing a joke, but Pocket used to be called "ReadItLater". Instapaper still exists and I imagine they're about to get an influx of Pocket refugees.

That a browser either maintain your own entire browser engine or you can't support additional types of extensions is a false dichotomy. Vivaldi chooses nto to support it just as much as the choose to integrate VPN, an email client, RSS, Atom, a completely custom UI, and probably other things I'm forgetting that Chromium doesn't ship for them.

What is changing is what Chromium will maintain, what Vivaldi decides to continue supporting is their own choice. My guess is it will be more random crap as well, but not because Chromium is/isn't supporting those things.

> Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?

Because they can make more money on apps. Like I said in the parent comment you're choosing to ignore.

> There's no evidence of WebKit languishing.

It's pretty well-documented that Safari has been a laggard when it comes to web standards, cherry-picked links aside.

the one with the cryptocurrency bullshit?

Since I'm slowly moving to self-hosting, I'll be installing Wallabag[0] most probably.

I also integrated my Kobo with Pocket with glee, but it turned into gloom when my saves ate all of the free memory of the reader :)

[0]: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

> the right approach to this space is building an aggregator and solving discovery/search for all writing on the internet.

This is not the right solution for me. Pocket was the perfect one, even in the first iteration. I don't want discovery. I want a personal box/shelf which keeps a list of what I want to read and what I have read. Permanent copies was a great add-on while it lasted too. Because I want the version I have seen. Not the edited/updated one.

Perch doesn't work the way I want. In fact, it's the direct opposite of what I need.

Looks like neat workflow. I use Obsidian too, but not in that way. I don't want a collage of what I have read, I want a database which I can dig, like Pocket.

Looks like my future lies in a self-hosted Wallabag instance.

I kindly disagree. Yes, Thunderbird's search is not revolutionary, but when I direct it to a box containing ~20 years of e-mails, it returns instantly, searching for the words that I want.

...and I'm not even downloading the e-mails to the system to save disk space. I have explicitly disabled that.

The problem seen to be that they give power to activists instead of engineers. What the fuck they know about improvements to their core product? The only thing they do is create pretty slogans, borrow money from big capital to grown on top of debit, and seek "new sources of income". This is what it made Mozilla turn from a company that does a super badass browser from a company that sells shit advertisements, infringing on users rights, and claims to be a "international conglomeration of activists" or some shit like this.

My guess is that browsers like ice weasel, libre wolf, while good pieces of software, they dont have a whole company behind them.

Libre wolf "about us" page, dont even have the developers real name, only their online handle.

The closest of a "professional" port of firefox is pretty much Zen Browser.

Is what I been using, alternatin with Brave Browser.

My guess. is going to be sold to a tech giant, and probably extinct. Maybe Microsoft buy it and rename as outlook for Linux.

Guess it falls back to us, the users. To fix the crapshow Mozilla has done. There are a bunch of small different iniciatives that use Firefox codebase. We just need to wait and see who will prevail.

I use too, but is not without its problem. It does implement a lot of adds in things like the new tab page, and it did some controversial stuff (they use to replace page ads with their own, essencially stealing the page monetization, dont know if they still do).

For a while Brave is going to be my stop gap browser. Hopping that Ladybird can soon replace it.

For all its flaws, Brave still annoys me less than Mozilla assh*les.

I also tried Zen Browser... lovely, but is pretty much Mozilla with a bunch of addons. The problem is, is not clear how much of the invasive Mozilla telemetry they left on their code base. Unfourtunally, any browser that orginates from mozilla bullshit, for now, I kind consider fruit of a posionous tree.

Has anyone here ever used switf ouside the apple ecosystem? If so, how is the experience going?

I think in swift like C# and Microsoft. Yeah, you can and I do run a lot of C# code in other platforms. But if you really wanna use everything it has to offer, it needs to be in windows, at least in the development stages.

Yeah, I dont like either, but I wont support Mozilla closed mind and stupidity. They pretty much abandoned Firefox (when was the last time they really updated the browser, other than incremental small corrections?), and I refuse to give my money to fund the type of shit they expend it.

They should have through about that before going all political in their positions as an organization. It was easy with the cushion of google and federal goverment money under them (impressive how easy is to do "charity" and activism with other people money).

Now I wanna see if they will put their wallets where their mouth is, and apparently, they will not.

Every time I receive a e-mail from mozilla fundation asking for 10 bucks to fund their precious inclusivity program that have nothing to do with firefox, because they lost goverment funds, I just laught and think they should ask for a loan from their previous CEO, since she receive 7 mi in one year. I just delete the e-mail after that.

>I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.

Ousted doesn't equate to making some changes then walking away in my mind. It doesn't sound like she was in-amicably forced out over results or the like.

I remember her expanding the number of positions on the board (and the often discussed compensation) not too long (relatively) before they had some rounds of firings. I remember being confused why one or both of the ones that joined said board(it's been a while) seemed...completely unrelated to both Mozilla or it's field of expertise or so.

> It's pretty well-documented that Safari has been a laggard when it comes to web standards

A few years ago, Safari being behind was a persistent narrative, which started because Safari didn’t support Chrome’s (often) nonstandard features.

These days, any important web features arrive simultaneously on Safari and Chrome (like CSS Grid) or within a month or two of each other… although it took 5 months for Chrome to ship :has in 2022.

Not a great joke. Instapaper was really the first one that was read it later. I thought they just it down, but I just switched to Android and Instapaper is (maybe was) only iPhone.

Del.icio.us was just bookmarks, no reader for the phone.

> suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this

I think Mozilla specialises in this. At some point, having many tabs open on the Firefox iOS app would eat all the memory and lag out the phone. This problem even came and went a couple of times over the years.

It’s an unloved child being held captive for the money it earns.