[handrous]

FF user (off and on) since Phoenix chiming in.

I'm going to level with you: I've looked at that Pocket button and all the Pocket ads FF throws at me on new tabs and on their obnoxious new-version announcement tabs, for years, but I do not actually know what Pocket does. I think it's some kind of cloud bookmarking or something. Maybe also something like the Reader view? I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I don't miss it on Safari (my daily driver these days, mostly for iOS integration and performance reasons, god knows not for feature-related reasons) and I've never cared enough to figure out what it does on FF when I use it.

I guess my alternative is bookmarks, which are 99.99% just a feature to let me feel safe closing all my tabs (and then never, ever looking at all those "important" bookmarked tabs again, ever—like, I've got many-years-old bookmarked sessions that were so important I couldn't close them without the security of bookmarks to make it feel OK to do so, but I've never looked at those bookmark-folders and very likely I'll die having never looked at them). I diligently export them every time I retire a system disk, so I've got a bunch of bookmark export files sitting on disks that I've also never imported or otherwise looked at. Probably I'd find all kinds of cool shit that past-me was looking at, but who's got the time.

[dredmorbius]

So summarizing: its intent isn't clear?

FWIW: Pocket is similar in general design to a number of "read it later" services (the Android app is still identified as "com.ideashower.readitlater.pro"), such as the now-defunct Readability, still-extant Instapaper, Maciej Czeglowski's Pinboard, and the FS/OSS Wallabag. There's a ... (very?) loose kinship with tools like Zotero, Calibre, and Elsevier-owned Mandelay, also knowledge-management / article management tools.

Pocket lets you:

- Save articles for later reading.

- Display many (though not all) of them in a simplified and standardised "reader" view.

- Apply tags. (I abuse this feature horribly.)

- Add highlights. (3 per article for the free version, unlimited for pro.)

- There is of course a social feature allowing shares and recommendations. I avoid this like the plauge.

- There is, inexplicably, no way to share, export, or otherwise save a bibliographic reading list, say, of articles on some topic.

- Exporting the article listing is possible (JSON format). You'll have to re-fetch items individually if you do this.

- Articles are not saved and you're still subject to linkrot, edits, or substitutions at the origin source.

- Saved content is accessible from any device by account, either from a Web client, from Firefox itself, or through Mobile apps (iOS, Android).

The functionality exceeds that of bookmarks, sacrifices local control and storage.

[pmontra]

It's not Pocket's business to know what I want to read. Never used any of those services and never will unless I could self host it. However I understand that it could be convenient for a lot of people. Anyway, I suspect that the user base of Firefox is getting more hostile to this kind of services as the number of users shrinks and they get more concerned about privacy. To Mozilla: you either push for privacy or you push for Pocket.

I kind of self host by parking interesting pages in new tabs and read them later. I've got more than 100 tabs open in my Firefox on Android. They're also a replacement for bookmarks.

[dredmorbius]

I get the privacy concerns, and share them to an extent. My Pocket account, as with most of my Internet activity, is pseudonymous, though proof against an advanced actors is of course unlikely.

You can simply not use Pocket, as with other Firefox capabilities most people don't use. I'm not aware that it exfiltrates data simply by existing.

My open tab count exceeds 1,500 :-/