
Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds - arayh
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/
======
burtonator
I think I've come full circle on this...

(I was one of the creators of RSS).

My current company, Datastreamer:

[http://www.datastreamer.io/](http://www.datastreamer.io/)

Provides social media data streams for companies and search engines wanting
full torrents of web content.

We deprecated RSS a LONG time ago, which was for me, like abandoning your
baby.

I think RSS is dead in many ways but it's also still around in a sense.

Mostly because of Twitter and Facebook metadata. You can accomplish 90% of
what you want with RSS just by parsing the metadata on an HTML page.

Because we've added NLP and content extraction algorithms on top of the
content we're able to re-construct feeds that are better than the original
RSS.

With another app I'm working on:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

I might actually use something similar to build in data feeds similar to a
feed reader.

But man.. I can't believe I'm thinking about building in a feed reader again
:-P

~~~
capdeck
> You can accomplish 90% of what you want with RSS just by parsing the
> metadata on an HTML page.

I am not sure you can. Metadata is quite inconsistent and many websites that I
have the RSS feed for block crawlers and scrapers. Advantages of RSS are
common standard and design to be consumed by a bot. What we've got instead are
curated fb and twitter feeds that people get hooked on and never look back.
Openness is the aspect of RSS that I'll miss the most.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
Very large websites aside, the RSS offer on most of the web is pretty
appaling. Standards are not followed or followed poorly. Things like
publication dates that are actually the upload date and completely unrelated
to the date the content went online, or images that are loaded by html
embedded in the description field in nonstandard ways, or sometimes in the
image field, or not at all... Or it's the wrong image, because the feed is
provided automatically and doesn't have the intelligence to correctly parse
the content...

That said, if Firefox hadn't hidden live bookmarks away several years ago they
might see more use. The small subset of users who bothered to look for them
and bring them back to the toolbar might even overlike the set of users who
disable telemetry, too.

~~~
Sophira
There's an article from 14 years ago that I remember to this day, mainly for
the immortal line "RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself":
[http://www.diveintomark.link/2004/the-myth-of-rss-
compatibil...](http://www.diveintomark.link/2004/the-myth-of-rss-
compatibility)

It goes into some detail about the various RSS incompatibilities and is well
worth the read, because RSS never really got any better even afterwards.

~~~
gregknicholson
Perhaps with hindsight Atom should have been called RSS 3.0.

------
SamWhited
I was perfectly fine with this right up until I clicked through to their
support page, which pushes Pocket as an alternative. How can they claim to
support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still
pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to
turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Get rid of RSS and
link me to an extension when I open a feed, fine, but then stop shipping
Pocket without giving me a way to uninstall it as well.

~~~
__jal
Yeah, that's just Mozilla attempting to save a stupid sunk-cost.

Pocket:RSS::allowance:salary.

I feel like we're entering a period when a browser shakeup is in order.

Chrome is spyware. Safari is usually an implementation laggard. Firefox makes
a seemingly endless stream of stupid, annoying choices. (Never used whatever
MS calls nextgen-IE now.)

Seems like it is time, again, for something that sucks less.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now.

Edge. It somehow manages to be worse than IE in many circumstances (including
being used to view Microsoft's own websites).

------
nachtigall
For everyone looking for an alternative, Brief is an excellent add-on and I've
been using it for the last 2 years:

AMO: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/brief/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/brief/)

GitHub: [https://github.com/brief-rss/brief](https://github.com/brief-
rss/brief)

It also includes a `Page action` so that an RSS icon is shown in the address
bar on sites that support RSS/Atom. Great for discovery.

Edit: Really strange, that `Brief` is missing in the curated list of readers
that mozilla is linking to from [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-
reader-replacement...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-
replacements-firefox) as alternative: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/collections/mozilla...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/collections/mozilla/refined-reading/) (This looks like a really
poor list) I've seen `Brief` recommended all the time by users. I don't really
mind that Firefox removes its RSS support: It was missing many features anyway
and had a really poor UX.

~~~
yaantc
You can check Feedbro as an alternative to Brief:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader)

I was a long time user of Brief but moved away during the transition to
webextensions. Although Brief worked there were some performance issues at the
time (maybe solved now?). Both provide a similar user experience, and are the
two best RSS readers I used so far.

~~~
skosch
Feedbro isn't open source, unfortunately.

Brief is atrocious-looking out of the box, but you can enter your own CSS to
override the styling. I've been pretty happy with it for the last few years.

------
AdmiralAsshat
As much as I like RSS, one of the repeated pain points is that I'd like to
actually _read_ the content in my Feed Reader, but on many of the sites I pull
from, the feeds only contain the article title and maybe half of the
introductory sentence before dropping a link to the full article, which I then
have to click and open in my browser.

To my mind, it kinda defeats the purpose of having the feed, since I could
just as easily scroll the front page of the site.

Was it the _intention_ of RSS from the outset that your feed would only
provide a "preview" of the article, or was the hope that you would get the
full body of the text?

~~~
delecti
Amusingly your complaint is actually my preferred use-case. I want my RSS
reader to essentially work like an automated link gatherer, because the
reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium for
most content. I exclusively open the collected links in separate tabs to read
and I get annoyed when I accidentally expand them.

~~~
Dylan16807
And including the article body preserves both options as a choice.

> because the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended
> presentation medium for most content

Huh, you must use RSS for different things than I do. The blogs I follow via
RSS work fine, and I only go to the site for comments on some of them. The
podcasts and tumblr posts work much _better_ in their respective readers than
visiting any website.

~~~
anyfoo
Apparently we do use it for different things. One example is Raymond Chen’s
excellent blog The Old New Thing, which has formatting that often breaks
completely on RSS, to the point of being unreadable (he does not have any
influence on the blog software as far as I know, though). Generally, I often
noticed that articles look (and sometimes convey their content) much better on
their actual websites, since that’s what they were formatted for first most.

Much more infuriating is that the various “Reader Modes” in browsers and e.g.
Pocket sometimes not only tends to omit images, but even _whole paragraphs of
the text_. It’s hard to notice that you missed a paragraph that you don’t know
existed, so I don’t trust them anymore. I believe that should be less of an
issue in RSS, since it of course includes the text to be displayed in the
feed. Still, since I cannot be sure that authors take full attention to their
RSS feeds, I prefer reading them on the website just in case some other
formatting quirk messes things up.

Stuff like info boxes or illustrations might not even be part of the main
body.

In that way, I actually prefer it when the RSS feed just contains a meaningful
preview. Though I guess the correct solution would be to include both a
preview and the full article, designated as such in the structure.

------
onli
I'm not okay with this. It is absolutely understandable that they want to
remove the feed reader integrated into Firefox, that thing did not work well
and I can understand that it was a lot of work. But the feed preview? If I
understand correctly that's the proper display of the RSS/Atom feed itself
when opened in Firefox, like
[https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg](https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg),
which should be properly parsed in your browser. That's the absolute core a
browser has to deliver: Rendering web content properly and not just to show
the source code. If Firefox can't deliver that, what else does it want to
deliver on?

And removing this feature - like the missing feed detection in the UI - is
what indeed can kills RSS, as it makes RSS inaccessible to users. Unlike the
feed reader itself this can not be solved by webextensions.

~~~
nebulous1
Doesn't parse it in Chrome

~~~
onli
Not sure about that, but I thought chrome is not parsing/rendering RSS at all.
It's part of the problem.

~~~
nebulous1
Yeah, chrome doesn't do anything with RSS. I was responding to you saying that
this is part of "the absolute core a browser has to deliver", but if the most
popular browser around doesn't do it then I don't see how you can argue that
this will be a major failure of Firefox

Also I don't agree that this necessarily can't be done a webextension. For
instance you can have add-ons like this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/jsonview/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/jsonview/) so I assume the same would be true for RSS

~~~
onli
Oh, my point there was not that it is not possible. It should even be possible
with an XLST stylesheet, though last I looked that was buggy. I wanted to
express that you can't make RSS accessible to users if users have to install
extensions to get a proper representation (and feedreader selection) when
opening a feed. This stuff has to be built in to make RSS usable for the
general public.

~~~
nebulous1
I completely agree that this makes RSS less accessible. So really it depends
on whether you see RSS as a core web technology, like HTML or JS. It's pretty
clear that Mozilla do not, nor do Google. Personally I don't either, although
I'll admit bias because I really seldom use it other than through automated
means.

------
mjw1007
They say they're removing three things:

\- the built-in feed preview feature

\- the "live bookmarks" support

\- the subscription UI

They give justifications for removing the first two, but not the third.

Assuming by "subscription UI" they mean the support for following a link to an
RSS feed and being given the option to send the URL to my preferred online
feed reader, I think that's a great shame.

Making it worse, that article says "that improved replacements for those
features are available via add-ons", with a link to what they say is a curated
collection of readers, but none of the add-ons in that collection seem to
replace the old subscription UI.

~~~
cabaalis
One of the justifications from the article:

> feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.

I'm curious the source of this data, seeing as I've switched to Firefox due to
privacy concerns.

~~~
yorwba
Telemetry: [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-
report](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report)

Edit: I just found out that you can look at the collected data at
about:telemetry

~~~
jasonjayr
Can the telemetry data be rigged? Are there anti-rigging measures in place?

~~~
dralley
Lol, you think there's a click farm out there installing Firefox on thousands
of VMs for the express purpose of throwing off Mozilla Telemetry?

------
thatsaguy
RSS support in FF was always poor, but that was often enough to preview a
subscription. It didn't need to be more complicated than that.

On the other hand, or hay, Firefox Screenshots!! Sooo useful. Pocket? It
doesn't get more federated than that! Or the dozen of DOM APIs added every
year, which are probably much more complicated to maintain than a simple RSS
preview feature.

I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed.

~~~
mindcrime
_I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed._

I've hated it for a while, especially as browsers move more and more away from
"browsing" and become more and more of a half-ass "universal application
runtime" combined with "something kinda like an X-server but not really".

I kinda think we need to split browsers so they support two "modes": content
mode, and application mode (or something like that) where the core
functionality of the browser is rendering HTML content and, well, browsing.
But a given page should be able to signal (through a meta tag or an HTTP
header or something) "I'm an application" where it gets run as an
application... which could still mean running in the browser as JS, or it
could mean handing the thing off to a content handler to run the application
outside of the browser. In my vision, the difference between "application
mode" and "content mode" would be things like: in "application mode" all
keybindings would pass through to the application, so you could - for example
- use F1 for context sensitive help, instead of F1 triggering the browser's
help menu. Also, app mode could allow things like altering the right-click
context menu, while content mode might disable that. Etc. etc.

~~~
icebraining
Prediction: 99% of sites would signal "I'm an application", including those
that obviously are content sites. The only ones who wouldn't (personal blogs
and the like) are already pretty usable, so they wouldn't gain much.

~~~
mindcrime
You may be right. And honestly, I haven't spent a ton of time yet thinking
about all the ways "content mode" and "application mode" would differ. A
couple of obvious ideas jump out, but there's probably more to be said about
this.

It might also be that the right thing to do is have a fine-grained permission
model where pages request specific capabilities from the browser, and the user
can allow or deny, with the ability to revoke permissions if abused, or white-
list sites in advance, etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The web is shit as it is because of the war on control over content
presentation. Both users and publishers want to have 100% control over users'
screen. The reason 99% of sites will declare they're applications because they
just won't give up control.

(This is the core of the ad blocking issue, BTW.)

Of course I'm an user, I'd love the split between browser and app runtime,
even just so that I could not launch the latter much, telling all the sites
pretending to be applications to just go to hell.

~~~
sleepybrett
Honestly the last time I wrote an app for a website it was specifically
because browser incompatibilities had me tearing my hair out. Calling
HTML/CSS/JS standards is fucking laughable.

~~~
ry_ry
Out of curiosity, when was that? Modern frontend has many issues (npm is at
least a hundred of them) but browser compatibility is a solved problem for the
majority of purposes.

HTML had been stable since forever, and browsers will render pretty much any
old shit you throw at them without too much cajoling. SVG/canvas were the last
things to be cleaned up iirc, but they're pretty usable now.

Most of the sharp edges on JS' DOM API implementations were smoothed off ages
ago and if you want to use the newest features stuff like babel and typescript
transpile es6 back to es5 with selection of polyfills. AFAIK safari still
can't round opacity properly, but since that's usually a stylistic thing just
use css.

Vendor prefixes in css have been less relevant for a fair while, were easy to
use if you wanted to throw some @keyframes down, and are a non issue of you
use an auto prefixer of some description.

The only problem browser is IE11, which had some admittedly wacky
implementations and out-dates most of the modern frontend stack by several
years.

There are still weirdnesses (Firefox's font rendering, literally everything
Safari does, features being implemented and deprecated simultaneously) but
nothing insurmountable.

------
mooreds
No one likes to see features removed from something. But this seems really
reasonable given alternatives and current usage. Tough decisions like this are
the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than
what you say yes to, that lead to great products.

Another favorite quote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision."
I'm betting this hurt (though a brief search through the FF mailing lists
didn't turn up anything), but it seems like a good strategic decision.

~~~
bachmeier
"Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's
what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great
products."

That doesn't apply in this case. Saying no would have meant they never added
it to Firefox. They said yes and now they're removing it. I'm not sure who
said it, but there's a saying along the lines of "If you force users to
change, they go shopping."

Keep in mind that the definition of "great product" depends on the person. For
the average user, a product that does what you want and keeps doing it is a
great product, and anything else sucks.

~~~
ams6110
They also said that the features are used by less than 0.01% of users. I
assume this is based on their own telemetry. So they're really not forcing
very many users to change at all.

~~~
mjw1007
They said 0.01% of _sessions_. Feed preview isn't something you expect to use
every session.

------
Nadya
Since this is the thread that took off for feature removal - I'll copy/paste a
response I had in another thread that didn't foster more discussion.

I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 - my entire workflow has slowly been
gutted over the years.

1) With FF 41 I could no longer set my New Tab page to my Home Page without an
add-on. As of Firefox 57 the add-on became buggy if you regularly and quickly
try to { Ctrl+T -> Ctrl+L -> Begin typing URL } due to limitations with the
Web Extension API. [0]

2) Lost Tab Groups as of FF 45 (the add-on isn't a full replacement of old
functionality)

3) Lost many, many, many addons with FF 57 including a very specific tab
management that an addon called FireGestures allowed for: using a context menu
to navigate my tabs.

4) Lost Bookmark descriptions with FF 62, also lost the Developer Toolbar

5) Now losing Live Bookmarks with FF 64

I no longer recommend FF as the "power user" browser but as the "I dislike
Google and want a good browser that isn't Chrome" browser. If you're a power
user of some uncommonly used feature, expect it to be removed at some point.
I'd love to see how Pocket usage is measured and the statistics of how many
people use that trash that they have shoved down users' throats since FF 38.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-
overr...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/)

~~~
the_clarence
Tree style tabs :/

~~~
kissickas
Tree Style Tabs (the add-on) is one of the two reasons I won't leave FireFox
(along with NoScript).

It's working fine for me after a bit of setup. What issues are you having?

~~~
the_clarence
Slow as hell

------
ccnafr
They announced it months ago, in July:
[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-
re...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-
support-for-built-in-feed-reader-from-firefox/)

Here's the direct link to the internal doc:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_NrJXupcMilTPFFVpmnI/edit)

~~~
mjw1007
That internal doc is rather close to the article linked here, though I notice
this piece of the rationale didn't make it into the public version:

« Additionally, we are working on various initiatives that operate in the same
area of focus as RSS/Atom feed support, like Pocket [...] »

------
norswap
What a load of bullshit. Sure it's extra code, but browsers are ginormous
anyway.

Removing Live Bookmarks is fine. But why get rid of the RSS auto-detection?
It's a good advertisement for an immensely useful _open_ technology.

Also... RSS is out and Pocket is in? Ironic.

I thought Mozilla was the one fighting for the open web? Well go fuck yourself
Mozilla - that's what I'm feeling right now.

~~~
orblivion
Keep in mind that running an open source company is squaring a circle. The
money has to come from somewhere. One corner or other has to be cut. I'm not
saying we shouldn't push back, but we should understand the position they're
in. They do pretty damn well all considered, and they're one of the few large
organizations holding the front.

------
xte
Personally I get my feed via mail (RSS2Email) because

\- I can follow many site I like, instead of using an aggregator I do not own
nor control;

\- I can read posts/articles/listen podcasts without crappy webui full of
advertisements;

\- I can KEEP posts I'm interest in as long as I want, offline, indexed,
tagged in my personal maildir taxonomy;

I still have to find an alternative for that. Usenet of course was a far
better way to follow news, ask questions etc, but unfortunately people do not
know it anymore... Any modern "feed reader"/"podcatcher" I found, except
elfeed are crappy, buggy, unuseful ridiculous apps that try to mimic
aggregators instead of focusing on contents.

~~~
daralthus
I am personally looking for the exact opposite. Read my newsletter
subscriptions in my rss reader, so that I can choose the time I read them and
keep email for important stuff.

~~~
xte
I do that, with emails. Simply thanks to notmuch-emacs my feeds does not
arrive in my inbox but in a dedicated dir and I can access it from notmuch
simply hitting 'r', outside notmuch, i.e. on mobile I can simply access that
dir in my IMAP taxonomy with K9 as MUA.

In the past I keep them separated but manage them, especially store&search
with full-post locally saved in case it disappear from their origin it was
hard or ineffective.

------
putlake
This is truly sad because RSS clearly fulfills a need that Facebook/Twitter
feeds never will.

Just last month I launched a bipartisan political news aggregator to force us
out of our filter bubbles[1]. The only way I was able to do that was by
consuming the politics RSS feeds for both right-leaning and left-leaning news
websites.

Without RSS, it's much harder to build an aggregator like this.

1\. [https://smashthebubble.com/](https://smashthebubble.com/)

------
hkai
That's plainly sad.

Next thing is websites will start removing rss, which means it will be harder
for me to scrape them.

~~~
sp332
Hopefully RSS users will move to readers with better UIs, increasing their
visibility and attracting more people to using RSS.

------
meesles
I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today.
Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with
advertising, tracking, etc. Most modern content sites would not support that
sentiment.

Personally, I think RSS was one of the crowning achievements of the web. So
much so that I attempted to make a little tool to 'create' RSS feeds out of
websites that I want to track:
[http://diyrss.info/u/meesles](http://diyrss.info/u/meesles) (the view for a
logged-in user shows when new content is available to read)

But again, this isn't sustainable. Any content site depending on revenue would
rather users visit their site every 2 hours for content updates than use a
third party like Feedly or DIYRSS. I think the solution lies in a
fundamentally different revenue model for content, at least for smaller
providers.

~~~
baldfat
> I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today.
> Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with
> advertising, tracking, etc.

How so? I think RSS increases advertising and tracking in actual usage of rss
readers. When I want to read the article I actually have to open the webpage.
The RSS feed normally gives you a headline and if your lucky the first
paragraph. So I am going directly to the source when I use RSS. When I use
Google News or Facebook I am going to a lot fewer websites.

~~~
meesles
Because I think the sites would rather you rack up page views browsing for the
content you want to read as well. They'd rather you scroll through their index
page than one curated and cleaned of ads/trackers. I do agree that the actual
content parsers like FB and Google are even more contrarian to what these
sites want.

~~~
baldfat
I'm just saying that the websites are short sighted when they attacked RSS.

------
tannhaeuser
And this is why I'm so strongly against adding any more features to browsers
such as WASM and new JavaScript language features and APIs: because browsers
are already extremely complex programs that can't easily be created from
scratch if FF decides to push their users around. I just hope all those
armchair web devs who are only looking at their favourite programming language
to become supported in browsers via WASM would consider how much they
contribute to the death of the web by too many features. Those parties already
in the game - browser vendors and self-acclaimed standard bodies - don't have
an incentive to simplify the web stack, and will never be able to step back
and say "the web is done" after 25 years of attempting to shoehorn a document
viewer into an application platform.

------
erikrothoff
I actually built my own extension for Chrome back in the day when I wanted to
switch from Firefox to Chrome. It was modeled after Firefox Live Bookmarks.
We've now come full circle and implemented an addon for Firefox:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/)

------
talonx
I have always used RSS. After Google shutdown their Reader, I switched to
InoReader. It's a tad slow but much better than alternatives (e.g. Feedly).
The reason I prefer RSS is that I need to keep track of a lot of blogs and
sites on topics of my interest, and with a feed reader I can "star" them, mark
them as unread, search across them (yes!), and group them into sections so
that I can process them more efficiently.

Some of us just want more control without flashiness, in an organized but
flexible way, in how we consume content, and RSS + a good reader is perfect
for it.

~~~
ibejoeb
I really can't trust hosted readers anymore. Just seems to be too expensive to
operate. I switched to Digg Reader after Google Reader shut. Not sure RSS has
much of a future.

------
Animats
Now if they'd just remove core support for Pocket.

------
unicornporn
For me, RSS is by far the best way to access web content.

I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with
FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero
trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the
fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around
and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any
cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-
Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds
for just about every service you can think of.

If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little.
You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds
(hello /feed/).

[1] [https://freshrss.org/](https://freshrss.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge](https://github.com/RSS-
Bridge/rss-bridge)

~~~
Dotnaught
I wrote vulture-feeds specifically for headline scanning via RSS. I don't want
to read everything.

[https://github.com/Dotnaught/vulture-
feeds](https://github.com/Dotnaught/vulture-feeds)

------
newman8r
Here's a repo I set up with 23 US newspapers, OPML format so you can import it
into your own RSS reader.

[https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-
opml](https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml)

~~~
superkuh
Trading feed lists is handy. I'm in. Mine covers all the sciences/tech/etc
plus a _little_ politics/entertainment. Everything is sorted into categories.
[http://superkuh.com/feedlist.opml](http://superkuh.com/feedlist.opml) (93KB)

As long as Firefox can still render feeds I don't care if they take out the
bits to manage subscriptions to third party services. That seems like fluff to
me.

I think most people who use RSS use native readers or, at the least, some
'cloud' reader. Not too many people need their browser to handle it
explicitly.

~~~
newman8r
That's a really solid list, thanks.

Next time I do a weekend hackathon I want to create something that helps
people like us share OPML files. All the RSS directories I've tried have been
pretty subpar. The feedly directory is good, I just wish I could export the
WHOLE directory as OPML (I wonder if someone's already done this)

------
tylershuster
Does anyone know a good way to view RSS in Safari? I'm tired of getting
"Safari cannot handle..." errors when debugging RSS. Even if I can just view
the code, I'd live with that.

~~~
aikah
If Safari does support XSLT, then it's up to the feed owner to create an XSL
stylesheet and link it to the XML file in order to turn it into HTML, however
it seems like very few developers even know what XSL is.

------
danShumway
I'm conflicted.

Moving RSS/Atom into webextensions is probably the right decision if you want
a small, focused browser that does what it does well and that allows the
community to innovate on top of it. And I want that.

So I should be happy, but Firefox overall doesn't seem to necessarily be
moving in that direction. Like, I still don't really get why we have Pocket
integration. So now I don't know.

It's a good decision that's maybe being made for the wrong reasons, and that
may have bad side effects.

------
unstuckdev
I already searched feeds up in my feed reader, but only because the existing
Firefox feature was poorly-integrated. I never could figure out how to have it
redirect feeds to a reader. I wanted something like the way you can add search
engines, but for third-party RSS readers.

The feature as it was didn't work very well, and they obviously weren't going
to improve it. So maybe it's for the best that they remove it.

~~~
mjw1007
I think the feed reader had to register itself, using registerHandler with
mimetype application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed .

See [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/2/Adding_feed_readers_to_Firefox)

------
clircle
This is fine IMO. Thunderbird has better RSS support.

~~~
Symbiote
Indeed, but the preview functionality was very useful for deciding whether to
add a particular feed.

Couldn't an XSLT + XSL stylesheet achive most of what the preview function
would continue to be useful for?

~~~
cubano
You lost me at "...XSLT + XSL stylesheet..."

I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it
horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with.

On top of that, I still can't figure out exactly what problem its trying to
solve, unless it purpose is job security to overpaid corporate contractors.

We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just
leave everything else be.

~~~
aikah
> I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it
> horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with.

It's because XSL is (recursive) functional programming, and most developers
fight that fact trying to write imperative XSL.

> We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just
> leave everything else be.

Except you're not going to anything with JSON without writing Javascript code,
since neither HTML or CSS do understand JSON. XSL works without a single line
of Javasript and it is still supported by most browsers.

------
qwerty456127
It sounds like a sad thing as RSS/Atom is a great thing that I would love to
see regaining its popularity but in fact "RSS/Atom support" in browsers always
seemed useless to me. Using the default browser facilities to read feeds felt
like using Notepad to write code. There always are much better feed readers
available.

------
distilpost
If your use case for RSS/Atom feeds is to read mainstream news, my startup
[https://distilpost.com](https://distilpost.com) can fill in very well. News
aggregated from over 1k sources as well as from tweets and instagram posts and
categorized both by region and subject matter.

------
seomint
I really want to be outraged by this (you know Aaron Swartz and all that) but
should I be?

------
ubersoldat2k7
Great! Now I'll be able to open XML files without that dumb dialog.

------
sixhobbits
interesting - I just got a notification from Dropbox

"On Dec 14, 2018, we're saying goodbye to the events RSS feed. We think some
of your team members may have used this feed.

We're focused on building better tools for viewing and monitoring activity,
for admins and users alike. Here are some other ways you can see what's
happening in Dropbox"

I don't see any relation, but could any factor have influenced the timing of
these announcements? Or is it just a coincidence that two large co's drop RSS
within hours of each other.

------
zmix
I feel, this may be more about Mozilla trying to get rid of XML at all.

Because, why would something simple as RSS be a burden to maintain? The code
has been written (!), the format well understood, the years gone should have
ironed out the bugs, so what could be the problem?

The only difficult thing to maintain may be an XML parser, but that is also
there since the Netscape days and, for RSS, you don't need current XML
technologies (XPath 2+), you are fine with XPath1.

------
sys_64738
When Google sunset Reader I was lost as that's the one and only way I access
content on the Internet. I found my solution in inoreader.com which is close
enough that I don't miss it. I can even login via Google SSO.

But it costs some $$$ but it's a great service and worth it IMO.

FWIW, I only want to see RSS feeds in a browser from any device I have and not
have to own the RSS backend myself, so my method works for me.

------
djsumdog
I totally forgot about the built in RSS support. I've been using a self hosted
tt-rss instance for a few months and really like it.

------
futurix
I much prefer a combo of Feedly and Reeder to any half-arsed RSS support built
into the browsers.

------
evolve2k
Why are these announcements on such a strange domain, wouldn’t an official
domain be more appropriate for this type of news?

Looks like a random personal blog site, I looked around first but currently
still have no idea what this site is otherwise for.

~~~
severine
This is the announcement that popped after updating Nightly:

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-
migratio...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-
migration?as=u&utm_source=inproduct)

I submitted it to HN right away, but it didn't get traction.

------
abrowne
I heavily use both Firefox and RSS — with FeedHQ — but I've never used any of
Firefox's RSS features (except the feed preview, but only incidentally, and
it's nothing I'll miss.)

------
Endy
With Firefox removing RSS, I think that's the final nail in the coffin for it.
There is nothing left of what Firefox was, it's now just a hollow shell and a
name that means nothing.

------
Semiapies
They're taking out RSS?

Hmph. Well, this is why I support Fire—... _Oh, shit._

------
nephrite
I like RSS very much and use it everywhere I can, but for me the live bookmark
feature in Firefox kinda sucked. I use other readers like e.g. Thunderbird.

------
rmbeard
A browser based feed reader is a better solution than browser tabs. A pity to
lose RSS for lack of imaginative use.

------
zmix
Why use RSS at all, if you can use ATOM?

~~~
handelaar
The format created out of petty spite against Winer that nobody's ever used?
Died on its arse when presented with millions of podcast users, didn't it?

------
yrro
Cd

------
nahalz
People have been bitching about Chrome too, and those things they were
bitching about can also be disabled using flags. Turns out Google and the
Mozilla Corporation are not so different after all!

~~~
r00fus
This is reductio-ad-absurdum. Follow the money - how much money does Mozilla
make from Pocket - probably a small % of their overall revenue. How much money
does Google make from Ads? Close to 90%.

~~~
ngokevin
Well, Mozilla's revenue is also 99.9% ads. It just comes indirectly from
search engines.

