Mozilla Pocket Review 16 Years Too Late

There’s no other explanation or excuse really. I am what could be considered a Mozilla fanboy. I make my kids use Firefox. Because of this deep respect for trying to make the Internet a better collection of places and connections, I’m impelled to use the dumpster fire in the disguise of a read-it-later app that is Pocket. That dumpster fire is sitting there on a street corner at 03:00 in the morning in Columbus, Ohio down the street from the student ghetto and it continues burning, burning and burning and no one really cares.

The review as a form of literature is a thing of currency. It is meant to be of the moment. It is supposed to be as valuable as it is current. This clearly doesn’t apply in my corner of the Internet by a mile. This is especially the case when reviewing software that came out more than a decade ago.

Pocket is so disappointing and could do so much more with even basics it’s painful. It’s like Metallica’s Black Album, but on repeat, following you wherever you go, the could have been, should have been just loud enough over the in-store speakers of your life that you just can’t escape. Pocket is in the Read-It-Later class of software which is that graveyard of good intentions we all bury all the articles and blog posts and whatever we think we have time and energy to read later on. You would imagine that the same company that makes a browser would have this saving and reading things on the Internet sorted. Instead, we have the too polished yet half working production which often doesn’t even give you a reader view. Typography, the power chords of reading, is treated like an afterthought in the mix. The chords and amps are there but it’s just so lacklustre, slow and half-assed I could cry.

Now imagine if you will, Metallica’s fourth studio release “…And Justice for All” as what it should be. Introspective, a relentless and rationally pummelling if that is even possible for a reading experience to be. But no. It looks and feels like it should do the thing but just feels like a mediocre hangover, painful enough to be painful but not enough so you feel sorry for yourself and just take the day off. And of course I’m going to use it again today, just like I won’t turn off “Enter Sandman” when it comes on the local rock radio station for the 83rd time this week. Because I think it can be something else.