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Mozilla Acquires Pocket and Its More Than 10 Million Users (recode.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the read-it-later dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, is buying Pocket, the read-it-later service, for an undisclosed amount. Pocket, which is described by Mozilla as its first strategic acquisition, will continue to operate as a Mozilla subsidiary. Founder Nate Weiner will continue to run Pocket, along with his team of about 25 people. Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, lets users bookmark articles, videos and other content to read or view later on the web or a mobile device. It's great for things like saving offline copies of web articles to read on plane rides or subway commutes, especially where internet access is sparse. Pocket, which was founded in 2007, has more than 10 million monthly active users, according to a rep. That's not bad, but suggests it's still a fairly niche service, especially as big firms like Facebook and Apple build simple "reading list" features into their platforms.

82 comments

  1. Well, it HAD promise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mozilla will kill it by trying to make it look like Chrome.

    1. Re:Well, it HAD promise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And it will only allow you to bookmark content from SJW-approved sources lest you be banned for daring to tread outside of the Mozilla-approved groupthink.

      Groupthink? lol, nice transference.

    2. Re: Well, it HAD promise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The word you're looking for is "projection" but it doesn't apply since you guys hold the monopoly on it.

    3. Re:Well, it HAD promise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, groupthink.

      Also not sure what transference has to do with anything. Are you sure you understand the definition?

      transference
      transfrns,transfrns/Submit
      noun
      noun: transference
      the action of transferring something or the process of being transferred.
      "education involves the transference of knowledge"
      PSYCHOANALYSIS
      the redirection to a substitute, usually a therapist, of emotions that were originally felt in childhood (in a phase of analysis called transference neurosis ).

  2. MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by ToTheStars · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What does this have to do with making a simple, secure, extensible browser? I can understand wanting to diversify revenue sources away from corporate handouts, but how much money can a minor social network be making if even the giants (e.g. Twitter) are struggling to make ends meet?

    1. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 1

      What does this have to do with making a simple, secure, extensible browser?

      That's easy: They can now broadcast to Pocket users not using FireFox: Pocket(TM) works best with FireFox(TM)! -- while making sure that Pocket works sub-optimally with other browsers.

      --
      Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    2. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The simple answer is that Mozilla != Firefox. They aren't supposed to just be about Firefox, they have a mission. Firefox was just their core product to working towards their mission, which hasn't really changed since its inception. So why not diversify in other ways that align with that mission? Because some snarkers think they should only concern themselves with Firefox, and to hell with all the other things their mission aligns with? I mean, why not chastize Google for all the non-search engine stuff they do, or Apple for diversifying into cellphones?

    3. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Desler · · Score: 2

      I mean, why not chastize Google for all the non-search engine stuff they do

      People do, routinely.

      or Apple for diversifying into cellphones?

      Because iPhones have made 100s of billions of dollars for Apple whereas Mozilla's products outside of Firefox have all been abject failures and have been canceled one after the other?

    4. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mozilla's products outside of Firefox have all been abject failures and have been canceled one after the other?

      Since one example is enough to disprove your assertion: Rust has been quite a success. Not only is it starting to pay dividends in Firefox itself, but it appears to be useful for all sorts of other things as well.

    5. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Desler · · Score: 1, Troll

      Yes it is a success as a niche, toy language.

    6. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not much. Why do you think people are downloading Pale Moon?

    7. Re: MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Twitter can't make money because it is a low-interactivity quick-consumption platform.
      People simply aren't on the site long enough to hit those ads.
      Most skip by things to get to the twets they want to see, read, gone.

      A service dedicated to caching longer articles is a vastly different beast.

    8. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by xfizik · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Read The Mozilla manifesto
      Nowhere does it say anything about

      making a simple, secure, extensible browser

      In fact, it doesn't even say anything about a browser. Their mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web. Whether they are making any progress with that is up for debate, but it's silly to complain about the browser every time you see the word "Mozilla". Mozilla the organization is bigger than Firefox.

    9. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by AuMatar · · Score: 2

      No, it isn't. Or at least it shouldn't be. When their entire goal was to make a browser, they did good work. Everything since then has watered down their effort and caused them to lose focus on the one thing they absolutely needed to have win in order to achieve their goals. They should be completely shut down other than Seamonkey/Firefox.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    10. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by gravewax · · Score: 1

      Mozilla lost its way a while back, this is just further signs of the rott.

    11. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      amusingly it looks like they are setting themselves up to repeat history, this is the same disease that brought netscape to its knees, it lost focus on building a functional stable browser and went under because of it. despite the MS situation at the time netscape navigator had become an unstable bucket of shit that developers and users were fleeing from on mass, obviously those lessons have been forgotten by Mozilla.

    12. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      I think they have given up on being a popular browser.

      I used Pocket back when it was Read It Later. I found I would just add stuff to my list for reading one day, on the plane, and never do it. I'd load the laptop up with movies and then end up watching the in-flight entertainment. Might as well use /dev/null.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    13. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would estimate around 10 million dollars per year, gross. Split 25 ways that's around 400,000 per team member. Once you account for rent, servers, advertising, etc it's probably more like half that, but still a pretty decent income.

    14. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Thunderbird is the primary competitor to Outlook. Web-based email portals are all a joke compared to client-side email programs. Killing Mozilla Thunderbird would be a hard blow to openness.

    15. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      It's more like when there was no competition in the browser space they looked good by default. They were competing against an IE6 browser that'd been out of development for years. Now they're competing against weekly updates of Chrome, Edge, Safari and others.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    16. Re: MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by corychristison · · Score: 2

      (Un)fortunately(?) Mozilla already essentially haulted development on Thunderbird except for security and compatibility patches.

    17. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thunderbird (like Seamonkey) is a continuation of the efforts that led to Zawinski, one of Netscape's developers, to state:

      Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

      Zawinski's Law is an indictment of overreaching goals. A web browser like Netscape (or Firefox) does not need to read mail, only to handle web browsing. A mail client should not depend on a web browser: it might include a lightweight rendering library for HTML mail (which was always an abomination), but the changes in Firefox made life hard on Thunderbird developers.

      Thunderbird should be a separate project, and it would probably be healthier if it belonged to a separate organization dedicated to making the best, open-source mail client possible. Firefox would probably be healthier if Mozilla refocused on just writing the best, open-source web browser possible. Both need to put their chief development projects ahead of any other feel-good mission.

    18. Re: MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Rust has not been a success.

      So far, only two pieces of software of any significant size have been created using Rust:

      1. The Rust compiler and standard library (and they're only partially written in Rust, last I saw; they both depend on C or C++ code).

      2. The Servo web browser engine. (It was very limited when I tried it recently.)

      That's pretty much it. (I don't count the many incomplete and abandoned "crates" on GitHub, since many of them are totally useless, assuming they even still compile with a modern version of the Rust compiler.)

      Both are from Moza.

      Rust can't be considered anything but a failure until non-Moza companies or projects build real and popular software with it.

    19. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mozilla lost its way a while back, this is just further signs of the rott.

      They may have decided to chase unicorns; same as Apple & Microsoft.

    20. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The classic example of a company in its terminal stages; management pumps money out of it to their friends pockets.

    21. Re: MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      https://www.rust-lang.org/es-E...

    22. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Having a popular browser is the best way to achieve their goals. Look at how Google deprecated Flash by slowly removing it from Chrome. Or how they get to decide which technologies live or die by implementing them or not.

      If Firefox was 50% of the browser market and decided to, say, make WebGL and HTML Canvas access click-to-play they would break 50% of the browser fingerprinting that goes on and send a very clear statement that user privacy is important. Send a bogus font list in response to Javascript queries and 90% of fingerprinting is dead. Enforce strict rules on third party content and the web becomes much more usable again.

      But because Firefox is just a small player in a market dominated by Chrome, they can't do any of that.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    23. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by xfizik · · Score: 1

      Focusing on one thing only, in this case Firefox, is a sure way to the grave.

    24. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Spot on. No idea why this was modded down, and I can do nothing to correct that myself today.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    25. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      What happened to "Do one thing, and do it well"?

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    26. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by xfizik · · Score: 1

      Again, when was that ever one of Mozilla's goals?

  3. it lets me do what now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lets users bookmark articles, videos and other content to read or view later on the web or a mobile device

    How is that any different from what I've been doing since the dawn of the web without this "pocket" service? Well except for the obvious, that someone else gets to see what I'm bookmarking now and can sell the data on to other companies for their own profit?

    I swear about 95% of new companies I hear about seem to be of the form, "You can do X!", where X is something I've been doing just fine without them.

    1. Re:it lets me do what now? by Tx · · Score: 2

      I'm no fan of pocket, it's disabled in my Firefox, but let's be fair, it does a little bit more than just bookmarks. You can view articles offline, which is still an issue for people who fly a lot (maybe other kinds of transport too) - you can see an article on your desktop browser that you want to read on your flight later, just pocket it and it's done. It does quite a good job of cleaning up pages, kinda like FF reading mode, and joining unnecessarily multi-page articles into a single document, at least on some sites. Sure there have been ways of achieving that since forever, I remember using some software back in the Pocket PC days to grab web pages and sync them to my Pocket PC for offline reading, but I haven't come across anything that makes it quite as easy as pocket. I didn't really play around with it enough to know what else it can do; if I travelled frequently, I'd probably use it, but since I only fly like three or four times a year, and the rest of the time I'm pretty much permanently online, I can't see a use for it.

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
    2. Re:it lets me do what now? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      I remember how IE5 was able to save a web page into a single file, with pictures, then Firefox couldn't do that and still can't without extensions.
      Also, local bookmarks are subject to data loss (hard disk crash, theft, etc.) and link rot. I wish I had a solutions for all these issues a few years back. Bookmarks suck, tabs suck, history lacks useful sorting/filtering/searching options (and might disappear anyhow)

  4. It's Love! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If feels like someone at Mozilla is deeply in love with the Pocket founder. First, they integrated Pocket into Firefox in what seemed little more than an attempt to leverage the browser to bring more business to Pocket. I don't know how well that went, but now they're delivering him a very sweet Valentine's Day gift of a (presumably) large pot of money to keep on doing what he was doing before.

    Love doesn't have to be rational, and Pocket doesn't have to advance the goals of Firefox.

    1. Re:It's Love! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, Nate Weiner (the founder of Pocket) has a wife.

    2. Re:It's Love! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, Nate Weiner (the founder of Pocket) has a wife.

      He could still be bisexual or at the very least bi-curious.

      The only way to know for sure: get him alone in a men's restroom, occupy the adjacent stall while he's taking a dump, and try to play footsie with him under the partition. If he reciprocates, then we will know. If he doesn't, he may be heterosexual, or he may suspect a trap, in which case we will not know.

    3. Re:It's Love! by Desler · · Score: 1

      No, Nate Weiner (the founder of Pocket) has a wife.

      And so did Little Richard, Rock Hudson, Elton John and numerous other closeted gay men.

    4. Re:It's Love! by Desler · · Score: 1

      That isn't to say he is closeted and gay, but simply saying that someone has a wife is not a definitive statement on their sexuality. Plus the person you responded to is clearly some bigoted troll so fuck them.

    5. Re:It's Love! by JohnFen · · Score: 2

      I don't know how well that went

      Me neither, but I do know that when they did that, it was the first time I got the feeling from Firefox that I get from IE and Chrome: that the browser has become actively hostile to me.

    6. Re:It's Love! by DonaId+Trump · · Score: 0

      You sound like you have a lot of experience consulting for the Republican party. I have a few openings in my administration if you're interested! Russian fluency is a plus, believe me.

  5. Pocket? The thing i instantly disabled in FF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Never heard of it.

  6. Wow, 10 million users! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And only 9.75 million of them are bots!

    1. Re:Wow, 10 million users! by sunderland56 · · Score: 2

      10 million users in only 10 years. At that astounding rate they'll be significant by the year 2500 or so.

      In the meantime a google search of "disable pocket" gets 925,000 results.

    2. Re:Wow, 10 million users! by CrashNBrn · · Score: 1

      Or you could learn how to use search, a google search for: firefox "disable pocket", gets 1210 results.

    3. Re:Wow, 10 million users! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Er, maybe I'm missing something but 10 million active users is a resounding success for pretty much anything.

    4. Re:Wow, 10 million users! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      145 results, actually.

      Google's first-page hit count is a so-called ass-pull number.

  7. Donations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Did they pay for this with the money they received from donations?

    1. Re:Donations by jopsen · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, Foundation and Corporation are different entities. Corp is owned by Foundation... but as I understand it there are some legal/tax constructs limiting movement of funds from Corp to Foundation, so it's not the same dollar.

    2. Re:Donations by sexconker · · Score: 1

      You are hungry and need to buy food. You are also a drug addict.

      You get a government handout expressly for buying things you need (food), and not things you don't (drugs). You also have some amount of your own money.

      You need food so you simply spend out the government's money on food.
      All other money you have is available to cover any shortfall in need on the food side OR your drugs.

      Despite the restriction, the handout still enables you to spend more money on the restricted thing.
      Worse, if the handout is in excess of need, you can still spend it all out on food, sell the excess food, then spend those profits on drugs.

      The only difference between welfare fraud and corporate level accounting fraud is that corporations have many more tricks and layers (like an ogre) to exploit and are generally more efficient at it.

    3. Re:Donations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, Foundation and Corporation are different entities. Corp is owned by Foundation... but as I understand it there are some legal/tax constructs limiting movement of funds from Corp to Foundation, so it's not the same dollar.

      Funds move under-the-table, without limits.

  8. Re:Mozilla == Bigoted butthumper apologists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So insists the even less relevant (and touchy) peanut gallery on Slashdot, huh?

  9. Firefox sake... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Would people please stop leaving comments about how terrible Mozilla is. It's like watching a child poking a dying animal with a stick.

  10. Re:Mozilla == Bigoted butthumper apologists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You say that as if I have some personal stake in Slashdot's relevance. Yes, Slashdot is exceeding irrelevant. BeauHD's company bought a rotting zombie corpse. And? How does this change the fact that Mozilla becomes more irrelevant with each passing year?

  11. So in other words... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Someone else to steal our original content, strip away the ads and make it available to a select audience while profiting on it. Great.

  12. How is Pocket a thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Pocket, for idiots who don't know about bookmarks or the clipboard

    1. Re:How is Pocket a thing by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Pocket, for idiots who don't know about bookmarks or the clipboard

      That's no good, I use the clipboard to store my daily backups. Fortunately, I've never had to restore from it, but it's good to practise safe security habits just in case.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  13. How to Disable Pocket on Firefox. by NiteRiderXP · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. Open new tab
    2. Type about:config in address bar and accept warning
    3. In the search box type pocket
    4. Toggle extensions.pocket.enabled to false

    I do this for all new Firefox installations. Also disabled hello (aka loop) until they removed it.

    1. Re: How to Disable Pocket on Firefox. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Better way:

      1. Point your browser to palemoon.org.
      2. Download it.
      3. Install it.
      4. Uninstall Firefox.
      5. There is no step 5.

  14. How about fixing a broken browser? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I used Firefox for the first time in 12 months yesterday. The browser promptly ate 3.5GB of RAM before freezing up on me. I think it's going to be a while before I try it again (Chrome meanwhile had the same number of tabs open and was using less than 1GB of RAM).

    1. Re:How about fixing a broken browser? by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 1

      I don't know how many tabs that was, but try the 52 beta with multiprocess mode turned on. Also, while it seems counterintuitive, you probably want the 32-bit version of Firefox even on a 64-bit OS. The 64-bit version does very little aside from using more RAM.

      --
      "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
  15. This is why I'll never donate to open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's like local government, with all the foolishness and pet projects, but without any shred of accountability. No, you better pay for that yourself.

  16. Huh? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    What does this have to do with making a simple, secure, extensible browser?

    What does making a simple, secure, extensible browser have to do with Mozilla?

  17. More stupidity from Mozilla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The big question is: Is "acquiring" this "service" going to make Mozilla money? I seriously doubt it. Remember they crammed Pocket into Firefox despite objections from users. This reeks of the old boys network. That they wasted money on this shows why they are in the bad business position they are today.
     
    I dropped Firefox a while back and went to Chrome. Not going back.

  18. Too much money by manu0601 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does Mozilla has too much money in its hands? There is a lot of room for improvement of Firefox itself, that should be the priority.

    1. Re:Too much money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The real question is: does anyone on Slashdot even care to know what the Firefox devs are actually doing with Firefox? Seriously, it's like you guys go out of your way to spin everything you can find about Mozilla as negative, and ignore anything that might get in the way of your little trash-talking spree.

  19. Does this mean Pocket will be open source now? n/t by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does this mean Pocket will be open source now?

  20. Re:What does this have to do... by hackwrench · · Score: 2

    I think this was a service they were trying to embed into their browser before they bought them. I think they want to make the service a browser feature like remembering bookmarks and passwords across computers.

  21. Nate Weiner = Chad Weiner's son (Mozilla) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    No, Chad Weiner of Mozilla is the father of Nate Weiner of Pocket:

    https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/author/cweinermozilla-com/

    1. Re:Nate Weiner = Chad Weiner's son (Mozilla) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is that a Weiner in your Pocket or are you just happy to see me?

  22. Time to clear out the inbreeding at Mozilla, eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fucking corrupt non-profits need to die.

  23. Re:Does this mean Pocket will be open source now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Yes. That is the plan, according to this Mozilla employee: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5wio45/mozilla_acquires_pocket/deadcf7/