Latest news with #Mozilla
Engadget
3 days ago
- Engadget
The war on links escalates with Firefox's experimental AI previews
Mozilla's Firefox has joined Chrome, Edge and other browsers in offering AI-powered overviews, but this time with a twist. The latest version lets you use a keyboard shortcut to open a pop-up that previews a link's contents when you hover over it from any web page. It's a new way that AI is being integrated into browsers that may help users but hurt publishers. To try the new feature you need the latest Firefox release channel version 139.0. Within the settings under "Firefox Labs," simply turn on Link Previews. "After enabling, use the Alt+Shift keyboard shortcut when hovering over a link to see the previews in action," Mozilla writes. Once turned on, you can hover your mouse over a link on any webpage and a vertical window will pop up showing an image on top, the publisher's link and a quick summary. Below that are AI-generated "key points" that provide further information. Mozilla previously said that it uses the SmolLM2-360M language model from Hugging Face, on-device with Reader's View content to ensure privacy. Link Previews first came along last month in beta but is now widely available in some regions. Like Google's AI previews, it could risk harming publishers by reducing traffic (which is likely why neither of those features are available in France where I live). It's also not clear if Firefox is paying publishers to use their information in AI-powered summaries.
TechCrunch
3 days ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Read-it-later app Pocket is shutting down. Here are the best alternatives.
In May 2025, Mozilla announced that it was shutting down the popular read-it-later app Pocket, which it had acquired back in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. While Pocket helped users save and discover millions of articles, Mozilla said the way people are browsing the web is changing, and it plans to focus its resources on other projects. Pocket users have until October 8, 2025, to export their saved articles and other items, including lists, archives, favorites, notes, and highlights. This essentially means you will have to find a new home to build a reading list through another save-it-later app. To help users with this transition, we've rounded up a number of apps you might want to consider: Matter is a Google Ventures-backed company that makes an eponymous iOS app along with browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The app lets you listen to articles and also transcribes your favorite podcasts. Though the app itself is free to use, you can pay $79.99 per year to unlock features like improved transcriptions for podcasts and YouTube videos, tools to adjust reading speed, and additional integrations with other apps like notes apps, Gmail, and Kindle. Screenshot Image Credits:Matter In March 2025, the company also added an AI-powered co-reader to answer questions about different topics users might have while reading an article. Matter co-founder Ben Springwater says Pocket users can email him at ben@ for a personal discount link. The company will soon offer the discount within its app and will launch a migration process for Pocket users. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW Instapaper, which was founded by developer Marco Arment in 2008, is one of the oldest read-it-later apps. It's available on both iOS and Android, and lets you save unlimited articles and videos without paying any fees. It was acquired by Pinterest in 2016. Image Credits:Instapaper However, for $59.99 per year, you can add notes to saved articles, have a permanent archive of articles in your accounts, create a text-to-speech playlist to listen to stories, enable full text search for all saved items, and get the ability to send articles to your Kindle. The company says Pocket users can import their account into Instapaper at Users who import this way will also receive an email offering a three-month free trial to Instapaper Premium. Raindrop works primarily as an alternative bookmark manager for web browsers. However, its accompanying mobile apps for iOS and Android allow you to read your saved articles or PDFs at any time. The free version gives you unlimited bookmark saving along with integrations like Zapier and IFTTT. If you decide to pay $33 per year, you will get AI-powered suggestions for organizing your content better, full text-search, reminders for your bookmarks, a duplicate and broken links finder, and a file upload limit of 10GB per month. Image Credits: / Former Twitter engineer Joe Fabisevich created Plinky to allow users to save and categorize any kind of link, including articles, videos, recipes, and memes. The app is available across all Apple platforms, along with browser extensions to save links. Once signed up, Plinky lets you use folders and tags to categorize your links, and even set reminders to read them at a specific time. Image Credits:Plinky You can save 50 links, create three folders, and use five tags with the free version. To remove these restrictions, you can pay $3.99 per month, $39.99 a year, or a one-time fee of $159.99. Pro users are able to save unlimited links, create an unlimited number of folders, use an unlimited number of tags, and set an unlimited number of reminders. With Pocket's shutdown on the horizon, Fabisevich says a dedicated Reader Mode will be added to Plinky's app soon. The app is also offering a 50% discount on the Pro tier through the end of May 2025. Paperspan is a very simple app that offers a reading list across devices; allows you to add notes; and has text-to-speech functionality. The app is free, but it offers an $8.99 per month subscription to unlock advanced search, as well as the ability to create playlists, show reading stats, and send your articles to Kindle. Though the app works, PaperSpan hasn't been updated for some time, which may not be a good signal about its long-term future. The app is available on both iOS and Android. Readwise, a tool to add notes and highlights to articles, launched its Reader app in 2021. The app allows you to import RSS feeds, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, and more to read at your convenience. Because of its integration with Readwise, the Reader app offers great annotation features. It also features offline text search and an AI assistant. Image Credits:Readwise Reader Plus, you can integrate Reader with knowledge management apps such as Obsidian, Notion, Roam Research, Evernote, and Logseq. The app is free to try for 30 days, and then you have to pay a $9.99 per month Readwise subscription to access it. Readwise is letting Pocket users save their entire Pocket archive into Reader and notes that its app supports a number of features — like PDFs, ePubs, X posts, AI, and filtering — which Pocket never did. DoubleMemory is a new indie app focused on the Apple ecosystem, and it has native apps for both Mac and iOS. On Mac, you can easily save any link or content by pressing ' Cmd + C' twice. The saved content will then appear in a Pinterest-style tile format. The app also allows you to read offline and search through text, notes, and tags. You don't need an account to start using DoubleMemory. And if you have multiple apps, it uses your iCloud account to sync content across them. Image Credits:DoubleMemory DoubleMemory is free with in-app purchases. It offers a $3.99 monthly subscription or an annual subscription of $17.99. Recall works as a browser extension and a mobile app that allows users to save content from the web, including articles, PDFs, blog posts, podcasts, Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, and recipes. However, unlike traditional read-it-later apps, Recall uses AI to automatically summarize content, categorize it, and then resurface it when it's related to something new you're looking to learn about. Image Credits:Recall Designed to enhance your ability to remember information, you can review your summaries from your personal knowledge base on a saved spaced repetition schedule. Recall is free to try with support for up to 10 free, AI-generated summaries. After that, you can continue to use Recall as a read-it-later tool, or you can upgrade to a $7 per month plan for unlimited AI summaries and other features. Wallabag is an open source read-it-later app that's also available as a €11 per year hosted subscription, if you prefer. The app itself works across browsers and mobile devices, offers a reader mode for more comfortable reading, and supports importing data from other services like Pocket, Instapaper, and others. Image Credits:Wallabag Open source web app Readeck is designed to help you organize any web content you want to revisit later, whether that's articles, videos, photos, or anything else. You can also use the service to highlight text, export articles to ebook format, save video transcripts, and more. Image Credits:Readeck Readeck works as a browser extension so you can save your bookmarks as you surf the web. Users can host Readeck themselves, but the company says it will offer a hosted version in 2025. It's also developing a mobile app. Obsidian's web clipping service lets you highlight and capture web pages you want to save with just a click on its browser extension. You can also use templates that customize how certain types of web pages are saved. For instance, articles are saved with their citations and footnotes, while recipes will include ingredients, steps, and nutrition. You can even set up custom templates to save from your favorite websites. Image Credits:Obsidian As an open source app, Web Clipper is free to use, allowing you to highlight text, images, and blocks of content for saving into the Obsidian note-taking app. Karakeep's bookmarking app lets you save links, notes, and images, and then uses AI to automatically tag items and make retrieving them faster. The app includes other features like support for lists, bulk actions, dark mode, full-text search, and more. Image Credits:Karakeep The open source app is available on iOS and Android as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. You can support its developer here. Dewey is another 'save everything'-style app that lets you save and organize web links, videos, and images, including posts from social media sites like X, TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, Reddit, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others. Image Credits:Dewey The service offers built-in organizational tools like folders and tags, AI bulk tagging, keyboard shortcuts, automatic syncing to Notion, export, a personalized RSS feed, and more. Dewey offers multiple plans, starting at $7.50 per month, which you can choose to pay annually for $30 off. This is not an exhaustive list, and we will keep adding more tools as we discover them.
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
A fan-favorite app for reading things later is going dark. Use this instead.
After 18 years, Pocket, a service that helped web-savvy readers dig into stories in their free time, is going dark. The Mozilla Corporation, best known for its Firefox browser, said it would soon turn out the lights on Pocket, a handy tool for discovering and saving web articles to a personal archive to be read (and reread) later.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Digg founder Kevin Rose offers to buy Pocket from Mozilla
Digg, the Web 2.0-era link aggregator that's now being given a second chance at life, is open to buying Mozilla's read-it-later app, Pocket. On Thursday, Mozilla announced it would shut down Pocket on July 8, saying that the way people use the web has evolved, and it needed to focus on new areas of development. Shortly after, Kevin Rose, Digg's original owner, now co-founder of the new Digg alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, posted on X that his company would be interested in acquiring Pocket from Mozilla. Tagging both Mozilla and Pocket on the post, Rose wrote, "we love Pocket at @Digg, happy to take it over and continue to support your users for years to come!" The post additionally tagged Betaworks founding partner Peter Rojas, previously the founder of Gizmodo and Engadget, now SVP New Products at Mozilla. Neither Digg nor Mozilla has yet to respond to a request for comment on the news. However, the deal could be interesting if it went through, as Digg could leverage Pocket's existing user base to fuel interest in its relaunch. Digg could potentially even integrate Pocket's reading list with Digg, making it easier for users to find and share engaging content directly to the news aggregator. This could provide an initial pipeline for feeding news and articles into Digg while it worked to grow its user base. Digg's comeback has attracted attention, as it pairs Digg's original founder, Rose, with Ohanian, who helped create the longtime Digg competitor, Reddit, now an internet giant of its own. Digg recently announced it has also brought on Christian Selig, the founder of the third-party Reddit app Apollo, as an adviser. Selig's Apollo app had been one of the best ways to interact with Reddit, but the company cut off the app's access by raising its API pricing to the point that it would have put Selig out of business. Digg isn't the only one to have gone after Pocket. Medium CEO Tony Stubbleine says he also explored buying Pocket in 2023, but never heard from Mozilla before it announced it was shutting the app down. "Not sure what Mozilla is doing, but it is kind of infuriating," Stubbleine told TechCrunch. "The Pocket software is easy to rebuild, but some of the infrastructure and integrations around the web would be hard to replace. So I'm sure that someone would have taken it on." Updated after publication with comment from Stubbleine. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Digg founder Kevin Rose proposes to acquire Pocket from Mozilla: 'We love Pocket at Digg…'
Mozilla recently announced that is shutting down its book marking tool Pocket later this year. On the support page the company revealed that Pocket will go offline on July 8, 2025 as the company starts channeling its 'resources into projects' that better match users' browsing habits and online needs. Now, Digg, the Web 2.0-era link aggregator has shown interest in buying Pocket. Kevin Rose, the owner of Digg shared a post on X in which he said that he would he interested in buying Pocket from Mozilla. 'We love Poket at Digg' said Kevin Rose In a post shared on X (formerly known as Twitter) Rose said, '. @mozilla @Pocket -- we love Pocket at @digg , happy to take it over and continue to support your users for years to come! cc: @peterrojas :)' — kevinrose (@kevinrose) Both the companies have not yet shared any more details about this plan. Mozilla shutting down Pocket As mentioned earlier, Pocket will no longer be available after July 8, 2025. The company says that users can continue using the app and browser extensions until this date. After July 8, Pocket will move into export-only mode. This means that users will be able to export their saves until October 8, 2025, after which user data will be permanently deleted. In a support page, Mozilla said 'Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has evolved, so we're channeling our resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs'. 'We're grateful to the communities that made Pocket and Fakespot meaningful. As we wind them down, we're looking ahead to focusing on new Firefox features that people need most,' it further added. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
