Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn’t the only one doing that… I’m sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Never even heard of Fakespot, though.
Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I’d get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It’s actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.
Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?
I’ve found it useful enough not too long ago, mostly for comparing Amazon’s pricing differences for identical products between various EU countries.
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
Keepa is better, and depending on whether you’re conspiratorial, not compromised as 3Camels was accused of some years ago.
Compromised?
3Camels was, maybe still is, fully dependent on the Amazon affiliate program. A program that was reduced at one point, killed off 3Camels competitors, but not 3Camels. Then Amazon asked them to stop tracking during Covid for a time which they did.
This is around the time that I heard about Keepa which has a different model, not solely Amazon but other stores too, and not paid via affiliates program.
Also it’s just faster. 3Cs was getting super slow to notify. You’d get an email, click and surprise, that sale was over yesterday.
I probably heard about the controversy on Reddit at the time but there’s a chance I found this site here which covers some of my recollections.
Thanks!
Never heard of this. Sounds useful, except I’m really only buying something from them because I need it quickly most of the time. I don’t have the convenience of waiting for price drops like I do with Steam games haha. Thanks for sharing!
Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I’ve had is to ignore any off brand looking product that’s been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it’s for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
I’ve found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.
based
didn’t fakespot only work in the USA?
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn’t tell ya.
I use Fakespot but wasn’t aware it was a Mozilla product.
Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.
Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.
I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.
well they are terminating it for a reason.
OMG I JUST started using Pocket because my work banned Firefox and made us all switch to Edge!!
Now how am I going to sync bookmarks and pages I want to read later on my personal devices??
I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don’t sync work and personal devices.
If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
I’d be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn’t require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
They literally have control of and log every app that’s installed and will bug you until you uninstall it.
Unless they’re doing app signing or binary examination, some of the methods to “log every app” literally look for an executable name. Renaming “firefox.exe” to “explorer.exe” (an obviously allowed executable name) and then executing it will still run Firefox.
Yeah, I don’t know how they’re doing it. They’re using some “zero trust” system. It’s beyond me.
They are probably scanning for the binary file executable.
I forgot what it is called but there is an extension that syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium browsers.
There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It’s the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.
Glad it’s gone for good.
Bookmarks and services like Pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving links to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while “read later” services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.
deleted by creator
“Read once bookmark”. Problem solved.
i used to use pocket all the time back in the day. slowly realized there arent many articles worth saving for later let alone reading at all.
Didn’t some articles have the pocket icon, and some were without? I remember trying it a number of years ago and being completely flummoxed by not being able to save things I wanted to read. Though it could have been user error.
I used to use Pocket a lot, it was my main way to read long form articles. I somehow stopped doing that years ago as a way to preserve my mental health. Since then I haven’t used Pocket once.
bUt iT’S jUSt bOoKmARkS
- people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
it’s a shame to see it go, it’s been the first read-it-later service that I was aware of and used. I’ve moved away to Omnivore (RIP) and then Wallabag (https://wallabag.it/ for 11€/year, but you can self-host it or find someone else to host it for you for a lower fee), but I’ve still been thinking fondly of it, despite Mozilla clearly trying to force people into social reading rather than just serve as a convenient offline storage of articles.
edit: this post isn’t a request for advice, I’m very happy with my current Wallabag setup.
Why would you need a saas solution if it’s for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
…so that you can read it on a device other than the one you’ve initially opened the link on? I can save a link to Wallabag from my laptop’s browser at home, have my e-reader sync it, and then read it offline while on a train.
what OS does your ereader run? can it run syncthing? can it open HTML?
it’s a jailbroken Paperwhite, so I could look into setting up a Syncthing KOReader plugin, but my current setup works perfectly fine for me.
oh, I realized you have been using wallabag nowadays. but syncthing, plus pages saved with the singlefile or the webscrapbook addon could work fine
I have ended up using Zotero for this, which takes a snapshot of the webpage for offline reading (and preservation). Synced to other clients through my WebDAV server. Originally only used Zotero as a reference manager for academic journal papers, but liked using it more broadly.
people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
I have, and if you need an SaaS for that, I am sorry for you. Pocket was great for getting around paywalls for a while.
if you happen to be an apple person Safari’s Reading List can save pages offline.
I hear you. I discovered Omnivore and was in the process of migrating from Pocket to it until less than a year later Omnivore was gone.
I’ve heard good things about karakeep (also requires self hosting) https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
How does all this compare with something like Goodlinks?
well, for starters I can’t install Goodlinks on Linux, Android, or a jailbroken Kindle.
Gotcha
Check out LinkedIn for this
Edit: multiple days later… Linkwarden not linkedin…
I liked Fakespot. Amazon obviously doesn’t care whether reviews are legit.
Fakespot has always felt inaccurate to me. Once every 6 months or so I gave it a go to see if any of the updates have improved it but it never felt like it did to me.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
Why go through that hassle if you can avoid it in the first place?
Because I’m buying the $8 option from a company called “XYBENOZ”. Without reading the reviews I already know there’s a 56% chance of failure, but I’m willing to take that risk because then it’s Amazon’s problem.
I stopped trusting it much when I noticed there’s a huge difference between the same product on amazon.ca and amazon.com. On one domain it can give something an F grade while on the other domain it will have an A grade.
It’s a nice idea but when you think it about it’s actually kind of hard to determine the quality of a particular listing apart from the obvious checks you can do yourself. Like if the seller is some random drop shipper or actually Amazon or the manufacturer.
Judging reviews with whatever AI system they use is not very accurate anyways. Once again the obvious fake reviews can sometimes stand out. But the better ones a machine can’t tell any more than you can.
I’ve also wondered about Fakespot’s accuracy. I just viewed it as one tool when doing online shopping. I’d prefer not to order crap in the first place than try to return something later.
I generally have already decided what to purchase before I load Amazon’s website. I also rarely purchase cheap white label products, and so Amazon’s reviews are mostly irrelevant to me. I’ve rarely needed to return items too and recently they were all my fault anyway, eg, not quite the dimensions I thought I needed.
I’ve never known about it until just now, but I wish I had, because my mom definitely needs something like that. Quite a shame
Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.
This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.
I used to use it before it got acquired by Firefox to store my read it later list.
they’re focusing on AI instead, it seems
This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs
T o I h f n e t t e F h r u e n t e u t r eNice. How long did it take you to write this comment? Whenever I attempt stuff like this, it takes far longer than expected because I overcomplicate things
The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.
Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don’t trust amazon’s own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
Noo! I loved Pocket. It’s integrated into my Kobo eReader. It was the only good way to get articles easily synced on to an eReader. I hope Kobo buys Pocket. Or Rakuten, since that’s a tech company and they own Kobo.
Supposedly Wallabag works Kobo readers. Most people self host Wallabag but I think they do have a hosted option as well.
YES! No more Pocket button sticking out like a sore thumb!
It literally takes 5 seconds to remove it.
But you can’t remove pocket from firefox just disable it. Given that it wa also a close source binary blob that made firefox not completely open source I’m glad it’s going.
Wasn’t it possible to remove that button?
Possible: yes
Convenient: no
It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.
“Oh no, I have to move the mouse for about 10 cm!”
with every fucking install on every machine. for years.
a waste of space and time. always has been. but did moz listen? no. because fanboys like you mock the user and give them the confidence to do stupid shit. lame CEOs, failed TB, fxa servers…geez the list of absolute wrong directions moz went is so long.
praising freedom and a decentralized internet, but store links, passwords etc on their shit american servers. the only good idea moz has was to start coding a browser…after that it just went downhill…according to the decline of users of the years. what is their market share today and why?
Wasn’t it in about:config? Or maybe it used to be.
Could have been back when the button was part of the address bar. But that was forever ago.
That’s what I’m thinking of them. Good on them for removing it in the meantime.
?
You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.
Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.
You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
And then people get all pissy when Google or Microsoft show a pop-up of a new feature…
Yes, Microsoft is especially bad in this regard. For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending. They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen. And youtube premium, oh boy.
For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending
This is… not quite related to the topic, no? Trial ending warning is not a “hey, here’s a new feature you might want to try out”.
They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen
Could you elaborate? I used to use Edge as my daily driver, now it’s my secondary browser. I have no clue what you mean here.
Not speaking of edge here, but the Microsoft fabric/power platform. They tried to sell me some feature for months and eventually i missclicked and started the trial. Now they are notifying that the trial ends in x days and they’ve been extending it so it never ends
Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
Thx for this.
Also, shout-out to https://karakeep.app/ (formerly “Hoarder”)
Thank you! Guess I’ll be trying something new.
Pocket is the sort of shit that makes me embarrassed to recommend Firefox.
As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?
Never used pocket, how does this differ from just having a bookmarks folder called “stuff to read while you’re taking a shit”?
The difference is in convenience.
On the one hand, you can add a page to your bookmarks, after choosing the correct folder, of course.
On the other hand, you can click a button and a page gets automatically saved in your “read later” storage, with a description, summary, and a preview of the content.
Pocket saved an offline searchable archive of all of the article text. Multiple times I found articles I saved that were no longer online. So no, it’s not the same as bookmarks
I don’t save stuff with it but I read the articles that come up on desktop. so it’s kinda like a community, subreddit, rss feed, whatever
Bookmarks can do all that already or am I missing something?
Before pocket I was using instapaper, seems like it’s still around. Bit of a shame about pocket, it’s pretty useful
Synced bookmarks. You’ll be happy to learn that this is also a feature Firefox offers.
I don’t want to sync my bookmarks. The sites I want bookmarked on my desktop are not the same as the sites I want bookmarked on my phone nor the sites I want bookmarked on my work laptop.
They go to different locations. The ones from mobile are in “mobile bookmarks”.
I use Inoreader as my RSS feed reader and it has a section to save webpages in a similar fashion.
“Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire”
This is a misleading statement. 86% of Mozilla’s funding is from google. Modern web browsers are a fucked landscape designed to perpetuate googles dominance
Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Am*z*n Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…
