I hadn’t actually signed up for Pocket; what I saw of it was via Firefox’s new-tab recommendations, and what I got out of it was a few random articles that were outside my normal feeds. And I’m about to lose even that little bit of utility.

Quoth Mozilla:

…we have to be intentional about where we invest our time and resources so we can make the biggest impact. […] With that in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to phase out two products: Pocket, our read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, our browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.

Uh huh.

Fakespot “didn’t fit a model we could sustain,” which I translate as “it didn’t mesh with the adware and AI bullshit we’ve decided to focus on instead.”

As for Pocket: “Pocket helped shape the curated content recommendations you already see in Firefox, and that experience will keep getting better” – probably with some more AI bullshit, because they couldn’t resist hyping “AI-powered features” (as well as the utterly irrelevant vertical tabs option) later in their post. Not that Pocket’s curators were flawless, but AI has repeatedly proved itself to be the opposite of “better.”

P.S. Waterfox exists. I’m already using it on my phone, because fuck Chrome and Chrome derivatives, and every little alleged “improvement” that Mozilla makes to Firefox lately moves me a little bit closer to switching to it on desktop as well.