Many articles nowadays are behind a paywall. So when I want to add an article from a paid newspaper to Pocket, I figured out that that portal just tries to grab the article itself instead of taking it from Firefox directly. Which means that you just see the part of the article you see when you aren’t logged in.
Does that make any sense? Not really.
Other read later clients take the loaded article working with articles with payalls. I know Flyleaf does this, although it is Apple only, so you’ll need to research for other platforms but they’re out there.
Pocket used to grab the whole article. It was great for long reads that you didn’t have time for until later. You could read the article from any of your devices (computer/phone/tablet). There was even a “report problem” button for articles that were cut off. And you could set it to download the articles to read offline when you were on a plane or something. If it doesn’t do that anymore than I guess it’s been enshittified by the Firefox buyout.
Instapaper does something similar and still seems to work.
Weird gimmick that I’ve literally never used or even ever considered using. There’s already this obscure thing that you can save articles and pages in for later called “bookmarks”.
Bookmarks don’t do the job, because you can’t read the article anymore
- when it was removed or the URL changed
- when you cancel the subsription of the newspaper
That’s a fair point. So I guess the purpose that it actually serves is bookmarking and saving the page at the same time. I can definitely see the use in that actually.
Bookmarks are problematic.
The page can go away, or be changed.
Which is why archive.is/archive.ph is so damn important.
Personally, methinks a similar style of bookmarking/read-it-later extension that leverages the archive.ph service would work wonders.
I’m surprised they didn’t build one themselves that included a funding channel for more support revenue. I mean, they’re currently labouring under a shockingly ænemic ≈$200CAD/wk revenue stream. That can’t be effective long-term.
Before I started using Zen, the first thing I’d do every time I installed Firefox is disable Pocket.
I don’t use pocket. It just seems like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
