Mozilla has announced today that its read-it-later service Pocket will be retiring its Mac app this month. Users are encouraged to install the iOS app on their Mac or use the web going forward. Here’s when and why Mozilla is shutting it down.
Not sure why folks here are so down on Pocket. I’ve used it on a daily basis since it was called Read It Later, long before the Mozilla acquisition. It’s a handy way to hang on to links temporarily, when bookmarking is overkill and I don’t want to have a million browser tabs open.
Very often I spot something on Mastodon (or pre-Musk Twitter) or one of my Discord servers and want to come back to it later. Maybe I’m on my iPhone and the site is something that would be better on my PC monitor. Maybe it’s a YouTube video and I’m someplace where I can’t play sound. Pocket does the job.
I might have to look into it again. I’ve been primarily saving links using Obsidian synced to an S3 bucket. There’s a nice plugin that converts links to pretty markdown. I even made an iOS shortcut to automate the saving of pages. It’s nice and minimalist, but it does require Obsidian to view the pages (excluding just opening the bucket directly), so I can’t see my links on my work computer.
Pocket does the job
I don’t think that’s not the point. Of course it does the job, so does every other read-it-later service which has an firefox extension. For those who don’t use pocket, it just becomes bloat.
I too used pocket before and after Mozilla acquired it during my college years as it had apps for all my devices and other services like instapaper were a paid service.
But now I use a different service now and pocket is the first thing I disable on “about:config”
@MrNiNeRjOsHuA I wish Mozilla would decouple Pocket from Firefox too and make it an optional extension in general.
Wait, people actually use Pocket? When they made it part of Firefox, that was the last straw for me to switch completely to Pale Moon.
I didn’t know Firefox and Pocket were linked, having just switched over to Firefox after Google’s antics.
I used Pocket all the time on Android when I had a commute via public transit and would save longer articles I found to read during the ride. Looking at the articles I have saved, my use has definitely dropped since I started working primarily from home though.
Good riddance? Now I want to run Mac Firefox on my iDevices just to be rid of Pocket.
(Before anyone jumps in, yes I know it won’t work. But a guy can dream.)