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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.

40 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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?

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

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

    4. 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.

    5. 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?
    6. 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.

    7. 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
    8. 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.

    9. 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
    10. 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.

    11. 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.

    12. 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
    13. 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.

    14. 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.
    15. 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.
    16. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by xfizik · · Score: 1

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

  2. 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

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

    Never heard of it.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.
  10. 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.

  11. 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)

  12. 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?

  13. 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.

  14. 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?

  15. 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.
  16. 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.

  17. 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/

  18. 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
  19. 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/