
The 3-year old "Implement RSS natively in Chrome" bug just changed to "WontFix" - simonsarris
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=33181
======
devindotcom
I just wish Google would have been straight-up about this, had a big blog post
saying "Here is why we think RSS needs to be replaced, and we've got some big
plans to replace it, which involve a, b, c, and existing standard d. It's a
bit abrupt but we're coming out with X on timeline Y."

Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never
returning their calls.

~~~
mdwrigh2
This has nothing to do with thinking RSS is dead or needs to be replaced, or
whatever. It's just closing a feature request that was never going to be
implemented. It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be
an RSS reader anyways.

~~~
david_shaw
_> It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS
reader anyways._

Well, I can understand that it might not have been for everyone, but it was
super convenient to be able to read RSS "folders" in Firefox. I'm a
Chrome/Chromium fanboy these days--I use it on all of my devices--but I still
miss that feature. If you don't want to use a certain functionality, it's easy
to just avoid it; you can't _ever_ use something that isn't implemented,
though.

Clicking on a bookmark and seeing the most recent BBC headlines, for example,
was awesome.

~~~
randomPlusser
+1 why not just follow bbc on google+ now though?

~~~
VLM
Awful UI.

Some people want a random subset of news for entertainment. G+ is great for
that. Here's a great big pile of recent stuff from everyone, a circle, or a
community.

On the other hand, lets say I want to verify I read every story from certain
sources (perhaps the BBC?) exactly, precisely once. I don't see a way in the
G+ UI to "mark as read" or "only display unread" or whatever. Might exist or
might be a weird way to hack it in, but its not intuitive.

For some reason option #1 is semi-popular among news readers, social
networking, and old fashioned or online broadcasting, but option #2 is nearly
universal among email clients and podcast clients. You'd never use an email
client with a UI of "here's a random collection of some recent emails" with no
way to tag them as read or deleted. I'd LOL at the idea of a podcast client
with "here's a random cast that you may or may not have already heard"

Another horrible UI fail is time based. G+ can only do one linear "newest to
oldest" sort. Even the dumbest RSS feed readers have some kind of
tag/save/star feature. So you can skim the whole feed, star/save/tag good
stuff for later detailed reading. Then once there is no "unread" left, start
reading the star/save/tag stories in detail, perhaps much later. This
"workflow" is impossible in G+ as near as I can tell.

Finally no one using the "RSS" workflow uses G+, so you get the chicken and
the egg thing, where there's no demand for even the most primitive of workflow
management in G+ because anyone wanting anything like that uses RSS. So the
BBC is a bad example in that their social networking people are probably
required to use both, but I suspect that 99% of my RSS feeds are not available
in G+ because they self segregate by workflow. You'll need a bigger shock to
the system than cancelling goog reader. I switched to newsblur once the
crushing demand let up a bit. I'm not going to abandon everything I currently
enjoy to watch cat videos on G+.

------
jackmoore
There is no conspiracy here. That feature wasn't going to be brought back to
Chrome, and should have been closed a long time ago. Shutting down Reader
shined a light on this issue, so if they hadn't closed it before now is a
logical time to close it.

Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be
constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already
been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just
inviting people to grind their axes.

------
hrayr
I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will
not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to
begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific
feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot?

    
    
      ...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome.  
      I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as 
      if we're considering this, when we're not.  It just gets people's hopes 
      up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action.
    

This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.

~~~
humanspecies
The fuss is about Google embracing/extending and then suffocating every WWW
technology they can't shove at least 20 ads into.

~~~
minwcnt5
Had Google actually even "embraced" RSS? I would say no. Reader isn't one of
their core products and never was.

~~~
streptomycin
It wasn't a core product even when gmail had a prominent link to it at the top
of the window? [http://guijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gmail-
more-...](http://guijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gmail-more-
menu.png)

~~~
ok_craig
Do you call everything that has an advertisement for it somewhere else a "core
product"?

~~~
streptomycin
By "somewhere" you mean "at the top of every Gmail page"? Then yes, I'd figure
that something Google prominently displays at the top of every Gmail page is
probably pretty important to them.

I mean... when something is widely displayed in the middle of a list of things
that includes

* Gmail

* Google Docs

* Google Calendar

* Google Photos

* Google Search

and nothing else, then I would naively consider it to be roughly as "core" as
the other things on the list. You wouldn't? Why not?

~~~
ok_craig
I've never thought about a definition of a "core product" before, but it seems
to me that it would be something that the company takes seriously, dedicates a
lot of time on, and consciously depends on for user retention and growth. I
don't think Reader fit any of those descriptions, and the placement alongside
actual core products was an advertisement - a hope that it might become
something more, but it never did.

------
rafski
RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's
perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off
of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.

They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly
out to kill it.

~~~
ChrisClark
I see plenty of ads in my feeds. And nothing to stop Google from placing ads
in Reader itself.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Most of the ad supported feeds I'm subscribed to have one ad post per week.
Most ad supported websites have many ads _per article_. Guess which medium
makes Google more money?

~~~
hysan
You can change this to:

1 ad per week on a RSS feed vs 1 ad per week on an entire website

and the answer would still turn out to be Ad Supported Websites. RSS users are
an insanely small group compared to overall users on the web. So yeah, Google
probably just decided that supporting RSS just isn't worth their money/time
regardless of how it compares to its other services.

~~~
holloway
But you can't (reliably) run JavaScript in RSS which means no AdWords and no
profile/context advertising. That's the stuff advertisers love, not one-size-
fits-all banners

------
tytso
I actually read RSS feeds --- using the Currents application (which is
supported by Google and under active development; it's getting updates) on my
Android Nexus 10 tablet.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.currents&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDMsImNvbS5nb29nbGUuYW5kcm9pZC5hcHBzLmN1cnJlbnRzIl0).

So for those people who claim that Google doesn't care at all about RSS,
Currents is certainly a counter-example.

And by the way, Google is a big enough company that to claim that a
corporation as a whole as an opinion about any subject or any protocol is a
little silly. Take for example, "IBM Loves Lotus Notes; therefore IBM must
hate SMTP." Absurd. There is a part of IBM that make a lot of money off of
Lotus Notes, yes. There are also lots of IBM engineers and former IBM
engineers who hated it with a hot blazing passion. I'm aware of one IBM
division which supplied its engineers with a Lotus Notes-free e-mail address
because it was necessary for them to do their jobs. Specifically, interact
with the open source community with a mail product that wouldn't destroy
whitespace in patches....

~~~
kmfrk
Maybe Larry Page should write a public statement entitled "Thoughts on RSS".

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Interesting connection you made there. Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" was
about moving away from proprietary tech towards open web standards. What
Google is doing with RSS is the complete opposite.

~~~
niclupien
With which private technology are they trying to switch to ? I believe they
are dropping RSS not replacing it.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Google+

------
philwelch
The old Google would champion RSS as an open alternative to proprietary social
networks. Now they're trying to kill it.

~~~
shortsightedsid
Do no evil as long as Wall Street is happy - seems to be their real motto.

~~~
Kerrick
"Do no evil" is not the same as "Do every possible good thing forever."

~~~
philwelch
Going out of your way to kill technologies that compete with your proprietary
social network qualifies as evil in my book.

~~~
minwcnt5
"Not going out of your way to support technologies you aren't interested in"
is not the same as "Going out of your way to kill technologies that compete
with your proprietary social network".

~~~
sbuk
But when not supporting these open technologies very obviously benefits your
proprietary social network, it is.

~~~
icebraining
Okay, then Dropbox is evil unless they support open file syncing technologies?

~~~
sbuk
If they are trying to shoehorn every man, woman and child into using their
social network in a bid to track their respective activities in so as to sell
the information to the highest bidder, yes. As it stands, Dropbox aren't so no
they are not evil.

------
doe88
On this subject I happened to experience something funny. Maybe one year ago I
installed a chrome extension (from the official chrome store) to provide an
RSS icon directly in the URL bar in order to subscribe to RSS streams. So far
so good, then I don't know when, maybe months later I noticed I had some
random popups with ads, it was very strange since I use adblock, I tried to
find where these ads were coming from, with no luck. Then a day, I used the
chrome inspector to analyze a web page and I observed something strange, on
every pages I visited an external javascript was loaded, long story short,
turned out the chrome extension was a kind of spyware loading a javascript on
every pages I visited and sometimes rising a popup. Maybe it took me more time
to find it because I only use chrome mainly for testing, my main browser being
Firefox, but this is the kind of experience who removed the little confidence
I had on the chrome store, and extensions in general, I'm very careful now on
what extensions I install particularly extensions needing to be loaded on
every pages I visit.

------
lrei
I guess this makes it clear where Google stands on RSS.

I think it's sad. RSS is a lot more open than the alternative: Twitter.

Google seems to think that the result of an end to RSS will be good for them.
Unless they are planning on buying twitter, I doubt it will be.

~~~
Evbn
Why do people keep mentioning Twitter? It's not even vaguely related to what
RSS does, any more than, say, a digital radio station you could tune iTunes
to.

~~~
splawn
When you boil it down Twitter, Facebook, and G+ do the exact same thing as
RSS,but they are all just easier,less flexible, closed and more centralized.
You publish something and your subscribers receive it....seems at least
vaguely related to me, imo.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
How exactly is Twitter the exact same thing as RSS? I don't really see how
someone tweeting about a new blog post being the same as what RSS does in any
way other than being notified that a blog post has been written and possibly a
title. I agree it is pubsub but that's pretty shaky. If the implication is
that because we have Twitter then we do not need RSS .. I just think that's
sort of ridiculous; is 140 characters the end of the road now? If not then
Twitter is not a great solution to replace RSS. You can argue that RSS feeds
have become like unread email but I think that is a different issue.

~~~
cincinnatus
For non-techies Twitter achieves what they would use RSS for (notification of
content) with convenient annotations. Yes they are very different, but that's
how it works in principle. I doubt RSS will ever be completely gone, but the
number of human readers was never high and is unlikely to go up in future.

Even apps that make use of it will be moving away from the user being directly
aware of it.

------
martindale
The past 72 hours: Google Reader shutting down, Chrome's RSS extension removed
from everyone's browser _and_ the Chrome store, and "implement RSS natively"
issue is now set to "wontfix". Way to be evil, Google.

Also posted as a tweet, because fuck being evil:
<https://twitter.com/martindale/status/313148391624417280>

------
kevinpet
That's a pretty whiny feature request. I read the first few dozen comments,
and I don't really know what exactly was being requested.

It's clear to me that the right approach is an extension specific to your
preferred RSS reader. I understand that some browsers have an RSS reader built
it, but that still doesn't make it a core feature that's going to be used by a
big portion of their users.

~~~
ernesth
This feature request asks for two things to be native in chromium:

1\. have an indicator in the browser interface that an rss feed is available
for the current page.

2\. have a preview of rss feeds rather than unstyled xml. It is just a matter
of adding style for some xml files the way shiira[1] first did or the way
safari[2], opera[3] or firefox do.

It is clear to me that the second is nice for the user even if the chromium
developpers do not intend to implement a full rss reader as it just consists
in making some common web documents readable directly in the browser, it is
far more logical for a web browser to display rss than to display pdf... The
first point is said to distract the user and clutter the interface so I can
understand why it should be an extension (firefox voluntarily suppressed this
indicator a few years ago).

[1]: [http://i1-news.softpedia-
static.com/images/reviews/large/shi...](http://i1-news.softpedia-
static.com/images/reviews/large/shiira_002-large.jpg) [2]:
<http://media.arstechnica.com/images/tiger/safari-rss-big.jpg> [3]:
[http://www.problogdesign.com/wp-
content/uploads/2009/01/wind...](http://www.problogdesign.com/wp-
content/uploads/2009/01/windowslivewriter3e889e18f9a4-12c7aopera-rss-
big-3.png)

------
AaronFriel
I'm starring the issue because I'm a slacktivist.

I'm also going to become less reliant on Google services because when they
decide other open standards are less profitable than getting more eyeballs
Google+ I don't want to be stuck like I am now.

~~~
martindale
I too have starred this issue.

------
Maxious
Turning off any further comments on that bug is cute.

~~~
itafroma
That's been standard procedure for issues getting a lot of off-topic comments,
or have the potential for the same, for some time, and it's definitely welcome
when trying to track the status of popular features/bugs. The point of issue
comments is to contribute to getting an issue fixed or resolved, not to act as
a discussion thread. It's quite clear this was a done deal for some time and
there's nothing further to discuss in that issue.

~~~
duskwuff
Especially given that every comment gets emailed to everyone who'd starred the
bug. Leaving comments open (and receiving "BUT WHYYYY" comments) just annoys
the hell out of everyone who'd starred it.

------
curcumin
Yep, Goog wants you to read news, find out about the world only through its
walled-pages, read the penultimate paragraph of this naive article sums it up!
[http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-
re...](http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-reader-it-
was-self-defense/)

------
kmfrk
This makes me even more reluctant to switch to Chrome from Opera.

I hope Opera continue to evolve their platform, WebKit engine or not. :/

~~~
zanny
Dissatisfied with webkit? Why not gecko(firefox)? =P

~~~
kmfrk
The engine switch doesn't bother me. It's just that Opera as a company is
currently in flux, and they are discontinuing work in their Dragonfly web
inspector, for instance, which does not at all suggest a good future ahead of
Opera.

Firefox is pretty much the polar opposite of Opera in terms of features,
although I like their work on open standards like Opera's.

~~~
memla
> they are discontinuing work in their Dragonfly web inspector

Can i get a source on this?

~~~
kmfrk
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299923>

------
ihuman
Does anyone know who pkasting@chromium.org is?

~~~
dangrossman
Peter Kasting is the founding member of the Chrome team at Google.

~~~
ihuman
I wasn't sure if the person that closed it was just some random guy, or a
higher-up person at Google. Thanks for clearing this up.

------
bbayer
Google next move: Remove Adsense for RSS. By the way Google Currents is doing
good job as feed reader and it is relatively new product. I don't think Google
has declared war to RSS. Since most of its APIs is based on Atom. May be they
want to make a transition to JSON based standard.

------
miles
"For a better user experience, we have migrated your feeds to a custom Google+
profile. We hope you will enjoy connecting with friends, family, and
advertisers while reading news brought to you by Cuke(R)!"

------
carlcory
The 1600+ people watching that bug, and the millions using reader are the
minority. RSS is for hackers, and Google doesn't want to invest in those
people. (Us)

~~~
sp332
RSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the
majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on
the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the
most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.

~~~
zanny
It is worth mentioning a large part of the reason RSS is so reclusive is that
none of the browsers kept the "subscribe via RSS" button in the nav bar
Firefox had 6 years ago. Back then it was one click to add feeds to the
browser, and anyone could use it. Now you have to go out of your way looking
for it.

~~~
clockwerx
I remember the FF bugs for removing it suggested only 7 percent of people used
it. What frustrates me is that 7 percent x web scale is not a small figure;
and many of those were curators - prepping info for others.

~~~
sp332
_7 percent x web scale is not a small figure_

Not sure if they still do this, but Mozilla used to give new hires a little
toy and say, "This is your million users; try not to abuse them too much."
That concept is built-in to the culture there. Why take up space and memory
for the 93% of users who don't use that feature, when an add-on can do just as
good a job for the 7%?

------
bluebaby
That's Chromium

------
humanspecies
I can't believe we're going to see idiots actually wear google's spyware on
their faces in a few months from now.

~~~
Kiro
I'm one of those "idiots". You're welcome to say it to my face.

------
humanspecies
IF YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR IT YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.

~~~
icebraining
You don't pay for Hacker News.

~~~
lmm
The HN readership is one of many things PG sells to companies in return for
equity in them. This should have always been clear.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, my point is that being "the product" is not necessarily bad or wrong, and
more importantly, that screaming that cliche on HN is very inconsistent.

------
CyberDroiD
Wow, I don't know about you, but this is amazing to watch.

It's like Google is operating without a head. It's turned vicious and acting
offensively against a specific technology.

RSS will live on, of course. Amazing that Google is also so pompous.

