Pocket Will Stop Working on Kobo

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Firefox gets less and less open and customizable all the time.

This has been ongoing for over a decade, starting with the Chromification of the browser and the removal of tabs-on-bottom against many users' wishes.

If you scroll down, one of the maintainer actually just smugly closes down comments because they've made up their bloody mind and anyone who disagrees is just stirring up trouble.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

This has been ongoing for over a decade, starting with the Chromification of the browser and the removal of tabs-on-bottom against many users' wishes.

If you scroll down, one of the maintainer actually just smugly closes down comments because they've made up their bloody mind and anyone who disagrees is just stirring up trouble.

I see. I didn't realize it went back that far. If not for the customizing you can still do with userChrome.css (probably limited but - so far - does what I want) I would probably have moved away from Firefox a couple years ago.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

I guess my feeling is why does Pocket need a modern browser to work? Somehow Dropbox and Google Drive are working on Kobo without a modern browser.

If it's about "security", this is a solved problem. You make app-specific passwords for the Pocket account and allow the app limited access to Pocket's APIs. It's been done for years with 3rd-party email clients and Outlook/Gmail accounts.

Google Drive and Dropbox both only share a read-only listing of a specific directory. Pocket offers the same rudimentary access, though at least Pocket on Kobo allowed us to archive or remove read articles. That’s more than Google Drive and Dropbox have allowed. However, it seems that Kobo is building in better support for Pocket now that Pocket is trying to phase out legacy logins. Wanting more modern and secure logins isn’t a bad thing. There had to have been a server vulnerability that necessitated this change. I’m just glad to hear Kobo is updating things to continue support for Pocket.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by rcentros

I see. I didn't realize it went back that far. If not for the customizing you can still do with userChrome.css (probably limited but - so far - does what I want) I would probably have moved away from Firefox a couple years ago.

I did - first with a few forks (Pale Moon and Waterfox). Now I primarily use the Chromium-based Vivaldi.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I did - first with a few forks (Pale Moon and Waterfox). Now I primarily use the Chromium-based Vivaldi.

I've got Vivaldi and Chromium installed, but I'm pretty much a creature of habit. Until Firefox takes away all methods of customizing their browser I'll probably stick with it. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if it's getting near to that point where they'll disable userChrome.css. I might move to Brave when (if) that happens.

[pickyaxe]

Alternative take to what I've read here: Mozilla may be getting worse and worse, but Firefox is still a good browser, and is by far the only sane desktop browser.

Meanwhile, Pocket... is trash. Pocket's condensing algorithm, or at least whatever it serves to Kobo devices, is shockingly bad. It inexplicably removes large parts of many websites that are actually part of the content, especially noticeable in websites that include examples of programming code.

Out of the ~1000 websites I've saved on my account over the years, I'd say about 25% never made into my Kobo because they're not considered articles. Of those that did make it, at least a third are unreadable because a substantial amount of the article content is missing.

[Badcatalex]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I did - first with a few forks (Pale Moon and Waterfox). Now I primarily use the Chromium-based Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is GOATed. I went from Firefox, to Chrome, to Opera, and now Vivaldi. It's basically the only modern mainstream browser to have a high degree of customization.

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by Badcatalex

Vivaldi is GOATed. I went from Firefox, to Chrome, to Opera, and now Vivaldi. It's basically the only modern mainstream browser to have a high degree of customization.

true.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I did - first with a few forks (Pale Moon and Waterfox). Now I primarily use the Chromium-based Vivaldi.

I did almost the same route, except that Vivaldi isn't my default browser. Hope one day I can decide to finally migrate, but there are still many irreplaceable add-ons that work fine in WF... :\

And then there are those unsolicited outbound connections all Chromium-based browsers except the Ungoogled fork do on startup. Sucks

[Badcatalex]

In fact... I think Vivaldi is the only one that supports coding in both CSS and JavaScript to customize the UI and how it works.

[Alanon]

Pocket has been getting steadily worse over time, this account development doesn’t really surprise me at all. There’ve been no improvements to the actual core Pocket functionality in years, the recent Android app overhaul has been borked (for example, all my old annotations were missing from the app for about 4-5 versions), the competition is rising (Omnivore, Readwise, Wallabag, Tefter, etc.) and Pocket is locking down and actually complicating features and adoption.

I used to be a premium subscriber, until I noticed that there are articles they can render in reader mode but just refuse to, even though a simple URL hack loads the text in reader mode just fine. On top of that, I conducted extensive testing and not a single one of the articles in my archive had a proper local Pocket backup, which was the main thing I was paying them to do. Apparently since all URLs were online, they didn’t bother with creating backups.

I’m still using Pocket to sync articles to my Aura One, mostly for very long form articles. However, I migrated everything to Wallabag - none of the "discovery" features, just text+images, backups of everything, with full file exports, highlights with annotations, and a fast interface, for 10€ a year. Once my Aura croaks, I’ll probably switch to a Boox device, since they can use the Wallabag Android app.

[kandwo]

Originally Posted by Alanon

Pocket has been getting steadily worse over time, this account development doesn’t really surprise me at all. There’ve been no improvements to the actual core Pocket functionality in years, the recent Android app overhaul has been borked (for example, all my old annotations were missing from the app for about 4-5 versions), the competition is rising (Omnivore, Readwise, Wallabag, Tefter, etc.) and Pocket is locking down and actually complicating features and adoption.

I used to be a premium subscriber, until I noticed that there are articles they can render in reader mode but just refuse to, even though a simple URL hack loads the text in reader mode just fine. On top of that, I conducted extensive testing and not a single one of the articles in my archive had a proper local Pocket backup, which was the main thing I was paying them to do. Apparently since all URLs were online, they didn’t bother with creating backups.

I’m still using Pocket to sync articles to my Aura One, mostly for very long form articles. However, I migrated everything to Wallabag - none of the "discovery" features, just text+images, backups of everything, with full file exports, highlights with annotations, and a fast interface, for 10€ a year. Once my Aura croaks, I’ll probably switch to a Boox device, since they can use the Wallabag Android app.

I made the same move after Pocket removed the possibility to scroll using the volume buttons (I was using it on my Hisense A9 to read articles on the go); the Pocket support team confirmed this move and said that they have no plans of reintroducing the feature.

Wallabag works great on all my Android readers (Hisense + Boox). It also supports tags, exporting to epub and PDF, which has proved useful a couple of times.

It is possible to use Wallabag in Koreader, but it's not such a smooth experience. And I prefer having articles separate from my books (it's annoying having to constantly clear them from history in Koreader).

It also just feels safer being open source. I don't quite trust Pocket.

[droopy]

Originally Posted by ps67

Bad news. If I want to read an article I don't need of any specific modern web technology: I only need to read the article. Kobo is the only reason I use Pocket. When it will be impossible to use it I won't use Pocket anymore.

Do you mean "Pocket is the only reason I use Kobo"?

[droopy]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Firefox gets less and less open and customizable all the time. Sorry to the folks who use Pocket, I never have. I didn't even realize Firefox had bought Pocket, but I did know that (by default) they were putting it my toolbar and in my home page (in Firefox). I always removed it from both places. I wonder how long before before they try to force us to keep it it there? I've never had a Firefox account either (and I'm not going to get one). Maybe it's time to look for a different browser.

Firefox is my preferred browser. if TreeStyletab extension and customizing chrome.css is gone, i don't know which browser I'd go to. I hope this level of customization never goes away

[droopy]

Originally Posted by Badcatalex

In fact... I think Vivaldi is the only one that supports coding in both CSS and JavaScript to customize the UI and how it works.

Vivaldi is based on chromium. i don't think chrom* based browsers let you customize the way I can with Firefox, where I can create and then edit userchrome.css.

[compurandom]

Originally Posted by droopy

Do you mean "Pocket is the only reason I use Kobo"?

Nope. Me too. I mean, I like sharing bookmarks between browsers with pocket, but the real reason I use pocket is as a "tl;dr; read it later" method to push articles to my kobo.

If pocket stops working on my kobo, I'll find another way to move articles to my kobo, Pocket is already broken in that it doesn't make all the articles available. If it stops working on kobo, I'll be abandoning pocket in a heartbeat.