The focus will be on “promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content”, where it will no doubt be used to plug in to Mozilla’s (rather complex) Context Graph doohickey. Pocket will nestle among Mozilla’s product portfolio. ‘Mozilla also plan to open source the Pocket code’ What It Means for Pocket The acquisition of Pocket, while not an obvious move, is at least a strategic one. The Mozilla logo recently received a dramatic makeover (though some may say make under) as part of a wide-reaching reset of the company’s brand identity. The company launched a stalled excursion into mobile with Boot2Gecko and Firefox OS, and in to smart devices and the Internet of Things (Panasonic launched a few Firefox OS powered televisions, no less).īut with failure writ large it was inevitable that the company would need to pivot back to what it does best: web.

Don’t Call It a Mid-Life Crisisįirefox doesn’t command as big a slice of the overall browser marketshare as it once did, and the rise of mobile-first computing focused around Google Chrome and Apple WebKit has made it far harder to establish the Firefox on the mobile web. Mozilla say the ‘strategic acquisition’ will help them grow their ‘mobile presence’ by ‘providing people everywhere with powerful tools to discover and access high quality web content, on their terms, independent of platform or content silo.’įirefox has shipped with Pocket integration since 2015.īoth Pocket and Mozilla stress that Pocket (paid features and all) will continue to tick over in its current form for now - but I’d be surprised if we didn’t see some synergy or interplay happen between Pocket and Firefox Sync in the mid-term. Chances are you’ve heard the new: Mozilla has acquired Pocket, the go-to ‘read it later’ service for many of us.

Mozilla pocket