[mananaysiempre]

For what it’s worth, as a Pocket user from before it got bought by Mozilla, it’s only gotten worse since then. First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline, which was basically the whole point for me originally. Now the Share Link button has stopped sharing the actual link and instead uses a redirection service (pocket.co) presumably so that Pocket/Mozilla can track you.

[mtillman]

They acquired Anonym and hired a series of ad tech execs over the past ten years with a commitment to becoming an ad network.

[mmooss]

The commitment is to develop privacy-preserving advertising. If successful, it would revolutionize privacy because, as we know, ads and their surveillance are everywhere.

Instead, maybe nobody will work in that project if you succeed in slandering Mozilla.

[aragilar]

You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising". Either you track users to ensure ads get displayed (because the places you'd serve the ads wouldn't serve them if they could/claim more ad views than happened), or you have no clients (because their ads aren't displayed). Broadcast works for ads because the clients can verify that you are broadcasting (and it means you can disconnect the group serving the ads from those who verify "views").

[mmooss]

> You can't have "privacy-preserving advertising".

If you would look at their work and talk about it, it might be valid. This is just someone's hot take they posted on the Internet.

[thoroughburro]

Maybe you missed the part after that statement, where they presented an actual argument. Yours is the hot take.

[AshamedCaptain]

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke Mozilla to remove this feature. I agree with you was the entire reason I used Pocket (literally replacing AvantGo for me).

Now Pocket is basically yet another ... web portal? advertisement platform? social network? I do not know how to describe what it is now, other than useless.

[michaelcampbell]

> I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke

nice... thanks, Mr. Babbage.

[glenstein]

Pocket still saves articles offline. It just saves them in article view. Which is the same as what Instaaper does. I just checked my phone and it has 1.07 gigabytes of articles saved for offline reading.

I don't recall it ever saving web pages in web view (though maybe you used to be able to see them offline when you used the premium plan, but now the premium plan doesn't save the WebView offline? I'm not interested enough in paying for it to find out so all I have is guestimation.).

So they do save, but they save as article view and not the webpage itself. Which is the same as the other services.

[AshamedCaptain]

You definitely were able to save the web view at some point during the "Pocket" timeframe. I explicitly remember even the "notification with progress" that showed up when it was doing that (since I would have to wait for it to finish before turning off the radios). Heck, the Mozilla docs still mention Pocket as downloading the web view, e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-pocket-...

> Offline Downloading: Pocket will decide the best view to download by default. If you want to specify whether to download Article View, Web View, or both, uncheck Download Best View.

The article view was a nice novelty 10 years ago, but as it is completely based on heuristics (readerJS-like, in fact I think it _is_ readerJS ) and they have not really bothered upgrading it, it is no longer a reliable way to capture web sites for offline reading .

Frankly, I want this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucker https://web.archive.org/web/20080903165121/http://plkr.org/ back :)

[glenstein]

I stand corrected! I will note that at least from my use case a saved copy of web view is a rather idiosyncratic user need not catered to by I think any of the other apps. As you do get article view and article view is what I actually want.

But you have reminded me, because I do recall that phrasing that you quoted about pocket deciding whether to choose Article or Web View.

I don't it's a particularly huge loss, and the exasperation from the commenter I was replying to seemed to suggest that they thought saving of any articles had been removed, which would be an appropriate cause for exasperation. But I don't think that reaction is warranted at all, just from not saving web view.

I also think it's not quite right to suggest that saved article view "doesn't work" or is a mere novelty. I just went through a bunch of my articles and randomly spot-checked them, and all of the ones saved to article view are without problems. Although I do recognize there's an occasional issue, but those are the exception rather than the rule. It remains a critical antidote to the unviewable overloaded with ads viewing experience that is the default experience for most people with most web pages. There's also an open secret that it bypasses login screens and pay walls, fir which it continues to be one of the best solutions.

But alas, I was not correct to suggest this had never previously been available.

[mananaysiempre]

Here are the ten most recent pages on my list, with [A] for article view working correctly, [B] for article view being broken, [W] for article view (and thus offline access) being completely unavailable:

- [B] https://spotbugs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/running.html (just completely mangled, starts with “-sortByClass=filepath:”, that is, skipping around half of the actual page)

- [W] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~dalyanda/mssecrets/hotmail.html

- [A] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~dalyanda/mssecrets/

- [B] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/types... (the “Note” inserts with important caveats are gone)

- [B] https://jimbojones.livejournal.com/23143.html (table at the end is gone so the sarcasm in the last sentence does not come through)

- [B] https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2018/07/kings-quest-vi-cliffs-... (screenshot after “At one point in this section it says...” is gone, leaving only the joke in the caption)

- [B] https://mtnphil.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/decompiling-sci-byt... (“Here are links to the rest [of the blogpost series]: [empty space]”.)

- [W] https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ucdigm/taken_me_yea... (I guess this one’s fair, I only saved it so I could later copy it to my quotes stash)

- [B] https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/ (“and it looked like this: [code snippet missing]”)

- [B] https://docs.rs/crossbeam/0.8.0/crossbeam/epoch/index.html (the actual reference, “Structs” / “Traits” / “Functions”, is cut off)

[glenstein]

The same test on my saved articles would show [A] for just about everything.

I don't think Pocket ever built itself with intended use cases being such things as looking at tables of server logs showing IP addresses (jimbojones) or Microsoft support pages, and I believe those are probably exactly the instances where switching to a web view exists to account for that.

If your deal-breaking use case is that you need an offline only archived web view of Microsoft support for a note about how "OpLock" means the same as "opportunistic lock" I think they're well within their rights to say that that's outside of their intended use cases, and that's what Web View (built into pocket) is for.

Certainly room for improvement, but they're just very idiosyncratic use cases. Do you get more success with those same pages on InstaPaper?

[glenstein]

>First the mobile apps lost the ability to show full web pages (“Web View”) while offline,

I've used Pocket on and off since back when it was called Read It Later and I don't recall it ever offering this feature (offline access to saved web page versions of articles), at least not outside of the premium service.

So I tried my best Googling skills, which seems to have increasingly diminishing returns with every passing day, but I did find a LinkedIn article from 2017 noting that this archive of web page feature was premium even then.

(Edit: It's worth noting that InstaPaper doesn't offer this either. Nor does Raindrop, nor did Omnivore (RIP) although you could print to PDF and upload it to Omnivore. The only article saver service I'm aware of that does is Wallabag, which is self-hosted.)

>10. Premium options

>So far, every feature has been free. If you upgrade to a premium plan, you'll get other features, such as permanent copies of your articles in case they're removed from the web, suggested tags to make bookmarking even easier, and the removal of sponsored posts from Your List.

>This post was originally published on Proof Is In the Writing on July 20, 2017.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complete-guide-pocket-ultimat...

[mananaysiempre]

Those are two different features. The premium one saved (saves?) things on Pocket’s servers. The one I was talking about saved full web pages on your device. It wasn’t “permanent” in that, for example, if you reinstalled the app and the page had disappeared from the web, you’d lose it, but otherwise it worked well enough that at some point Pocket was the main consumer of storage on my phone.

The setting was “Always fetch Web View”, next to the still-extant “Always fetch Article View”, and searching for that phrase will give you some contemporary discussions[1,2]; alternatively, Pocket’s own docs on the Wayback Machine[3] will tell you that, as recently as 2022 (and at least as early as 2012[4]),

> Pocket will download the “Best View” by default. To override this decision, you can configure Pocket to always download Article View, Web View, or both.

> It’s possible to control whether Pocket downloads Article or Web View:

> [...]

> 4. Enable Always fetch Article View, Always fetch Web View, or both

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/405pyu/i...

[2] https://mfreidge.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-to-set-ios-poc... (disclaimer: I’ve never used the iOS version)

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220801202820/https://help.getp... (I’m not sure it still worked at this point)

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120712102128/http://help.getpo...

[epiecs]

I can recommend Zotero. You also don’t have to pay for storage if you have a server/device that is webdav capable. I connected it to my Synology nas and the setup was trivial.