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    Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

    (support.mozilla.org)
    1222 points phantomathkg | 11 comments | 22 May 25 16:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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    segphault ◴[22 May 25 17:45 UTC] No.44064599[source]▶
    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.

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    bayindirh ◴[22 May 25 19:51 UTC] No.44066084[source]▶
    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.

    replies(6): >>44066706 #>>44066996 #>>44067237 #>>44069659 #>>44070926 #>>44072928 #
    1. gxqoz ◴[22 May 25 21:25 UTC] No.44067237[source]▶
    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.

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    2. chii ◴[23 May 25 06:58 UTC] No.44070561[source]▶
    > 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!).

    replies(1): >>44072846 #
    3. alias_neo ◴[23 May 25 08:20 UTC] No.44070958[source]▶
    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.

    replies(1): >>44071444 #
    4. retinaros ◴[23 May 25 10:01 UTC] No.44071444[source]▶
    Just pgsql is enough. Even a chache db or sqlite do full text search
    replies(1): >>44074827 #
    5. kamarg ◴[23 May 25 13:46 UTC] No.44072846[source]▶
    > 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.

    6. GuestFAUniverse ◴[23 May 25 15:41 UTC] No.44073853[source]▶
    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...

    replies(2): >>44077005 #>>44078045 #
    7. alias_neo ◴[23 May 25 17:40 UTC] No.44074827{3}[source]▶
    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.

    8. E39M5S62 ◴[23 May 25 22:00 UTC] No.44077005[source]▶
    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.
    replies(1): >>44096267 #
    9. bsder ◴[24 May 25 01:13 UTC] No.44078045[source]▶
    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.

    10. bayindirh ◴[26 May 25 11:20 UTC] No.44096267{3}[source]▶
    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.

    11. sshine ◴[05 Jun 25 04:04 UTC] No.44188229[source]▶
    > 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.