
Firefox removes RSS support - treve
https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/
======
sciurus
The removal was previously discussed at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821)

------
cJ0th
I am super disappointed, Mozilla! This is such a slippery slope you've created
here. If FF doesn't support RSS anymore then even fewer people will use RSS
and RSS will die rather sooner than later. This is such a pity as RSS can
really empower users.

You basically infringe your own mission statement:

> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and
> accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where
> individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and
> independent.

~~~
bittermang
Despite RSS' cult status among Hacker News readers, I'm sorry to be the one to
tell you that RSS is already dead. It's been dead. I would even go so far as
to say it was dead on arrival, because the average user was never able to make
any sense of it.

~~~
captainmuon
I am developing a little site which is a news aggregator and search engine for
a certain niche topic. Out of a couple hundred sources, I'd say more than 95%
support RSS, basically anything that uses wordpress or any blog or CMS system.
I was really surprized how widespread it still is, and it makes my life a
whole lot easier, since I don't have to scrape all those sites.

Maybe the model of subscribing to all your favorite blogs with a news reader
didn't catch on, but RSS is still used a lot behind the scenes for other
purposes.

~~~
vntok
You just wrote it is a little site for a niche topic. What you call widespread
is not nearly as widespread as you think it is.

~~~
JadeNB
@captainmuon
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683845))
didn't say it was widespread in any absolute sense, only that he or she was
surprised by _how_ widespread it was.

------
sattoshi
I will go against the grain here and say that this is good. RSS is not a core
function of a web browser and as such should be handled by an extension, if at
all.

~~~
notafraudster
I think browsers should render any content type in a way that provides
functionality for a user; for example, I think it would be great if when
loading a JSON file, I could toggle between the raw data provided and a
pretty-printed, syntax-highlighted, collapsable tree view of the JSON file. I
think it would be great if when loading an MD file, I could toggle between the
raw markdown and a rendered version. Certainly when I load an image or audio
file outside a webpage, my browser decodes renders the content usefully.

Given these cases, why would XML files be any different?

~~~
htor
yes to all this, but then when do you stop? how many file types should be
supported by a browser? i'm sure some people would like it that the browser
could edit spreadsheets too. there are so many different use cases.

~~~
eletious
Agreed. At a certain point you find that you've made more than a browser,
you've made a full OS

~~~
adw
If you have a security model and a virtual machine, you already _have_ ,
haven't you? Browsers are in a meaningful way _already_ operating systems.
(This is not an original thought).

------
nreece
Running a profitable RSS-driven startup
([https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com)), I've come to the conclusion that
RSS is not a consumer technology. It's a business technology, and a critical
notification 'protocol'.

Millions of businesses, 'knowledge workers' and infovores rely on RSS for
their daily workflow and learning, without which they'll have no other
reasonable alternative to stay updated with decisive information and insights
for high-volume, high-frequency, low-noise Web content.

Starting from Google Reader's shutdown to Firefox's removal of RSS support,
it's just that these consumer vendors have not been able to leverage its
business use-cases. It's a feature for them that they couldn't monitize,
because that requires a different tool-set, which is not their primary
product.

RSS is a backbone, much like a simple API, but it was touted as a front-end
enriched with ads, analytics, widgets etc., that didn't/can't work for the
casual consumer.

RSS ecosystem is alive and healthy for it's vast and core audience,
irrespective.

~~~
mandelbulb
Uh, this post sounds like an ad. The pricing model of that service obviously
targets businesses instead of consumers, so it's kind of obvious from where
the demand would come.

------
4lch3m1st
Not cool. This also seems to imply no support for Atom feeds as well. I have
switched my media channels entirely to RSS/Atom feeds, though I only read them
through Emacs. This cannot stop stuff like fake news, but it always seemed
important to me to the fact that it makes viewing discussions entirely
optional (you have to visit the link for that). The lack of ads is also a
plus.

~~~
ahmedalsudani
You know, I feel like a moron now.

I have come to use emacs for everything, and I love being in emacs. It never
occurred to me that I don't have to find an RSS reader -- just an emacs
package.

Thank you for writing this comment.

------
matthewn
People who don't use RSS say it's dead, and they won't be convinced otherwise.

People who use it every day know that it's not dead at all.

Firefox's decision will not make the slightest bit of difference for either
group of people.

~~~
cortesoft
It is all about how you define 'dead'. Some people mean 'dead' as in 'not one
single person is still using it' and others mean 'dead' as in 'it is declining
in popularity and is no longer mainstream'

RSS is dead for the latter people but not the former.

~~~
craftyguy
Another definition of 'dead' is "I don't use it, and no one I know uses it (or
if they do I don't hear about it)"

~~~
sergers
Agreed.

I used RSS 10 years ago. Even bought a keyboard with a LCD to have my RSS
headlines always available.

I have no need for that functionality for years.

I know noone in person who uses RSS anymore.

I would call it dead (but obviously as per other comments here, people still
need/use them).

~~~
craftyguy
> Even bought a keyboard with a LCD to have my RSS headlines always available

Woah, what keyboard was this?

------
krylon
Firefox' handling of RSS feeds as live bookmarks was one of its killer
features back in the day, at least to me. But it must have hit a nerve with
others, too, because I remember that Microsoft put something RSS-related into
IE7; I never used IE7, though, so I cannot vouch for that.

Of course, there are alternatives, but still - the live bookmarks are _really_
cool and extremely convenient to use. It's a shame they are going to be
excised. At least that gives me an incentive to pick up the RSS aggregator I
wrote a couple of years back and polish it a little.

~~~
dblohm7
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

~~~
krylon
Thank you!

------
mandelbulb
First, a shout-out for inoreader.com :)

Really disappointed in Mozilla. After all, it's quite obvious, if you don't
modernize and even continue to hide a feature for years, its usage won't
improve unless external events drive the demand.

And since RSS readers counter the interests of both ad- and subscription-
driven media, it's unlikely there will be any demand generated by anyone else
other than RSS aggregators themselves.

~~~
jarfil
It used to be a way for media to keep their readers updated about new content,
which was in line with the interests of both subscription and ad driven media.
But since then we've come to have Twitter, Facebook, mobile apps with
notifications, even websites with notifications, so RSS has become somewhat
redundant.

~~~
mandelbulb
Uh, what have notifications anything to do with RSS? Practically all all web
services and mobile apps for it offer them.

Social media, on the other hand, is an alternative solution to the consumption
of information, not inherently a better form of aggregation.

It is mainly the addiction to social feedback that attracts people to social
media, while RSS is a boring stream of data you've specifically decided to
process.

~~~
jarfil
RSS was created in 1999, when short of visiting a website it was the only way
to get updates about new content. Now, there are other ways which people
already use and like, addiction or not.

~~~
mandelbulb
When RSS was created is irrelevant, when its age does not hinder innovation in
its implementations. It's like saying email or phone calls are obsolete
because social media has taken over.

------
bonzini
That's a pity, live bookmarks are useful for things other than blogs, for
example bugzilla queries. I hope the Web Extensions API is enough to provide
something similar.

~~~
asadotzler
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

------
guybedo
Not sure we're losing that much, there are many good RSS readers that provide
way more features than Firefox does. Off the top of my head:
[https://feedly.com](https://feedly.com),
[https://inoreader.com](https://inoreader.com), and my own
[https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io) (with a nice dark theme
[https://aktu.io?theme=dark](https://aktu.io?theme=dark) :-))

~~~
chc
I'm not familiar with your reader, so I don't want anyone to take this as a
comment on what you've made — but I know that the first two are both
monetized, though they don't tell what you'll have to pay up-front. A third-
party for-profit business with sketchy monetization practices doesn't seem
like a better replacement for RSS integrated in Firefox.

~~~
jtbayly
Agreed. I just tried to find a feed reader for my phone and those two creeped
me out for sure. No way I’d give them my email address.

Why do you need my address in order for me to view RSS feeds from somebody
else?

~~~
tunap
May want to check out SparseRSS.

[https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.shandschuh.sparserss/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.shandschuh.sparserss/)

------
nickik
To bad. I found this really useful and would often use Firefox to look at RSS
of podcasts.

Sadly many pages don't have a good page to browse threw or search podcast. In
the RSS page you could do a page search and find all the relevant info.

However there are probably other ways to achieve the same thing, so I'm not
really all that opposed.

------
Communitivity
This is sad. Atom is going to be one of those standards that gets uptake
eventually, and Mozilla is already positioned well. It cost them nothing to
keep it other than the additional maintenance complexity, while removing it
upsets the admittedly small at present userbase that use the features alot
(like myself). I use Live bookmarks for server status updates, commits, and a
number of other things in addition to blogs.

That is easier for me than having Growl on my Mac, DBus notifications on
Linux, or Windows Push Notification Service on Windows. Instead I can use one
protocol, and the same app I've already installed, on each of those platforms.

~~~
avtar
> It cost them nothing to keep it other than the additional maintenance
> complexity, while removing it upsets the admittedly small at present
> userbase that use the features alot (like myself).

Sounds like they're being pragmatic then by removing a not so popular feature
that has the potential of adding maintenance complexity.

------
8bitsrule
Not the best move from Firefox. But, they never did support RSS more than
half-heartedly.

OTOH, the constantly-maintained-these-days Thunderbird supports RSS -just
fine-.

------
DrPhish
Thats really too bad. I use RSS heavily with internal tools to give me sorted
lists of config changes, trouble tickets, alarms, caller logs,
emails/voicemail, etc.

I also have a nicely curated set of RSS searches from Nyaatorrents,
craigslist, Kijiji and a few other sites that I check thru firefox.

------
marban
As the creator of the infamous Popurls, I can assure you that RSS is anything
but dead since I launched a successor at hvper.com a while ago and the site is
alive and kicking. Obviously a lot more is coming from APIs these days but no
major site has removed support for it.

~~~
jessaustin
[EDIT:] Suggested correction...

~~~
marban
Thanks, Corrected.

------
pnathan
installed firefox recently and it's showing me recommended content from
Pocket.

bro not cool. I don't want your backend recommendation engine tracking what
I'm doing.

(online or off)

(and, yes, I disabled it, as well rewired the pocket-relevant urls to
example.com)

~~~
aylons
"Important Note: Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser
history. The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should
see happens locally in your copy of Firefox. "
[https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-
reco...](https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-
recommendations)

~~~
pnathan
That only _marginally_ makes it better...

~~~
rhizome
Digging in your heels when your central point is refuted is not a great
strategy, and your reply seems to indicate that you're prepared to move the
goalposts.

~~~
pnathan
I don't want an analysis of my browsing habits by anyone _not me_ ,
fundamentally. I don't want "popular sites" sent to my machine, I don't want
my habits sent upstream. Either is not my desire.

I really don't feel like having the debate as to whether its local or remote -
both are quite compromiseable in terms of security.

I don't want to have this integration into my browser. I don't like Green Eggs
and Ham, Sam I am. _I do not want it this way or that, online or off_. That is
the goalpost I expect Mozilla to hit, based on their general vision.

If I want to have my browsing habits analyzed, I'd rather `cat` out the
history file to a tool I wrote.

Mozilla being an entity historically predicated on better practices choosing
to deal this way is highly unpleasant. And, on topic, RSS is a good open
practice that should be kept. Mozilla's choice to axe RSS and keep Pocket
seems to all be in the same vein.

~~~
onli
> _I really don 't feel like having the debate as to whether its local or
> remote - both are quite compromiseable in terms of security._

The moment that thing is local your concerns are not valid anymore. If a local
browsing habits file can be exploited your browsing habits could also be
detected by other means. Like you yourself said, that is just included in your
browsing history (stored anyway by default).

There is no point in expressing a dislike for a good solution when the thing
they are doing does not at all conflict with their mission. Which is the thing
with removing RSS support, but not with the site recommendation.

If your main concern - not wanting that your history is uploaded - is met by
the great solution Mozilla seems to have found here, it would really be the
right thing to accept that.

------
vshabanov
I would shamelessly suggest to try my web based reader -
[https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com) \- simple business model, no
ads/tracking, just read your feeds effectively.

But in general that's bad. Having feeds support in a browser is a good way to
get more people to know about RSS. And the more people know about RSS the
better for humanity.

People must know that there are another ways to get content than liking
something in a silo. And more importantly - the medium is the message -
content that you get in RSS feeds is different from social media. It's not
oriented to be likeable or shareable or to make money in any way. It's more
about ideas, opinions and utilitarian (not emotional) news. Yes, you could
still get junk in RSS feed, but there are much less chances to get it.

------
Jach
Yet another reason not to upgrade to Quantum+ I guess. Currently I've got ~30
RSS/Atom feeds in my toolbar.

Does anyone have Pocket usage numbers to measure its popularity? Web Dev
tools? The Firefox Tour? Since we're already discussing stripping out features
based on such a corporate metric...

------
sershe
Firefox has been removing stuff for a while... the slippery slope has started
at the point when the extension compat checking became a version-based setting
that you need to re-set after every update. It was downhill from there... what
used to be a hyper customizable browser with lots of features and
extensibility, is now just inferior, open-source Chrome wannabe.

I've personally stopped using it a few months ago after being a fan since
before it was called Firefox (Mozilla browser? or something). The only things
I miss are minor stuff like being able to color tabs (who knows, Firefox might
have disabled that too since then).

~~~
sp332
Chrome doesn't have per-tab accounts/"containers", built-in tracking
protection, a screenshot tool, built-in or even first-party dark theme, an API
to let extensions hide tabs, or the (upcoming in FF63) ability to control
autoplaying video on a per-site basis. And the mobile version still doesn't
support extensions at all. Even if you don't _use_ these features, I don't see
the argument that FF is a Chrome wannabe.

------
TheCapeGreek
So, now for my RSS feeds I use to check for news articles to read _in my
browser_ , I'll now have to install an external program/extension just to load
the feed, to read these articles _in my browser_.

------
indefiniteWaste
Wow. Really fucking awful decision.

Parsing XML is such a hassle? Laughable to think Firefox is so bloated that
not rendering a styled DOM for an XML datatype saves them an hour of payroll
or trims hardly a megabyte off their binary.

This is probably the least amount of complexity they could drop, and yet they
bloat the fuck out of their application, with features I turn off, avoid or
never use.

Pocket, Web RTC, those stupid cartoon images for their error messages. And so
much more, worth so much less.

~~~
spc476
Parsing RSS is a hassle. The specification never made it clear if you could
include HTML or not---did you entity encode the HTML? Strip it out so it's
only plain text in the feed? The original designer of RSS, Dave Winer, never
clarified that point, nor did he want to. In fact, he got downright _nasty_
when a group _did_ clean up the specification and released it as RSS 2.0. That
lead to the development of Atom, to clarify these issues and remove Dave Winer
from the discussion.

So there are at least three different RSS standards, most of which are under
specified as to what is and isn't allowed. It's like the tag soup of XML.

------
valeg
I'm very disappointed, Mozilla. This move completely hinders RSS discovery and
use. RSS isn't dead yet. It's actually an important technology for the free
and open web. Pocket? I doubt...

------
notriddle
I've used RSS pretty heavily, but never Live Bookmarks.

Who sticks a feed of news stories in a drop-down menu?!

~~~
rhizome
Live Bookmarks always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.

------
BuckRogers
Absolutely tragic.

I've been using FF RSS[0] for 16 years now, since Mozilla Firefox was Mozilla
Phoenix. Never left the browser all these years, of course I tested other
things out and kept native browsers (Safari/Edge) as backup browsers. But
these features are what differentiate it from other browsers, there's no way
there's substantial ongoing maintenance cost to RSS/Atom support at this
point.

Shame on them, they know better than this. If they want to help advertisers,
if they want a centralized web, if they want to remove the few reasons left
for not just using Chrome, then it's a great idea.

As soon as I lose my RSS support, for the first time in 15 years (before which
I was a Netscape Navigator user) I'll be looking for a new browser.

I see a lot of mentions about Foxish, I tried that with Chrome a few times,
it's not very reliable. I didn't find it worked very well at all, updates
erratically and so forth.

If all browsers are becoming the same, there's very little reason to not just
take the performance-power savings of native browsers. So I'll likely just use
Edge and Safari going forward. Browsers are the majority of what people use
their computers for, so any resource savings that results in power usage
reductions is welcome, especially on mobile. I'll take a good hard look at
Brave as well, those folks are actually trying hard to upset the apple cart,
instead of just removing features to upset someone.

[0][https://i.imgur.com/Xzv9KyS.png](https://i.imgur.com/Xzv9KyS.png)

------
pvorb
I so much hope they're not going to remove it from Thunderbird, which I'm
using for consuming feeds.

~~~
bittermang
RSS always made more sense to me in a mail client than a browser. Live
bookmarks were useless to me.

~~~
scrollaway
I remember the original video introducing Google Reader. "Imagine an inbox for
the web", the guy said.

------
gfody
bummer. I use live bookmarks extensively, it's nice to be able to see at a
glance whether or not a blog or web comic has an update without visiting the
site. anyone know of an extension that will provide this functionality?

~~~
muizelaar
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

------
ourcat
If you view the source of any Feedburner RSS feed, you'll see that it's quite
easy to use an XSL stylesheet with some CSS and make the actual RSS render
however you like in a browser.

------
Alex3917
> they represented an idea that anyone can start a website and become part of
> the "blogosphere"

The main barrier to entry isn't the lack of RSS, it's the fact that people
don't read as much anymore. It's gotten to the point where if you submit
anything text-based (as opposed to photos, video, podcasts, etc.) to a lot of
subreddits the moderators flag it as spam.

~~~
Karunamon
That's more to do with Reddit being horrible and horribly moderated than any
concrete problem with RSS, though.

~~~
jarfil
There are also subreddits with mostly text only submissions, but of course
they are neither the meme or porn ones.

Actually, there are even some subreddits which act like a RSS feed for some
sites.

------
frio
While the built-in reader isn't the most amazing thing in the world, I assume
this also means the Subscribe button is being killed? I'm sure an extension
will be able to do the same thing, but that's somewhat of a nuisance.

------
tschellenbach
If you're looking for a free alternative:
[http://github.com/getstream/winds](http://github.com/getstream/winds)

------
jacekm
Ouch, I was actually using this feature. :( I hope Mozilla knows what they are
doing...

------
aaaaaaxax
Userbase removes Firefox support

------
znpy
Mozilla: killing the open web.

------
brian_herman
If everyone hates what firefox/mozilla is doing why dont you guys stop writing
blog posts and start making a fork of firefox/thunderbird?

~~~
h1d
Not sure why you're mad but Firefox doesn't exactly consist of 10 files.

~~~
brian_herman
Well I guess I should chill sorry... but if like even if some of the people
stopped blogging and started either testing the alternatives or maybe wrote a
few lines of code to fix the small bugs we would get somewhere.

------
cecja
Who needs RSS when there is pocket. /s

~~~
ethana
It's sad that Mozilla's excuse when responding to the Pocket integration was
that Pocket wouldn't affect Firefox if you you use it. Now why don't they say
the same for RSS? The "new tab" page is a glorified Pocket ads right now.

~~~
dblohm7
You can turn those off easily enough: just click the gear in the top right of
the newtab page.

------
andrewmcwatters
I think if anything, this supports Mozilla's message: "... where individuals
can shape their own experience and are empowered..."

Well, individuals shaped their experience by not using RSS.

~~~
vthriller
Well, that thing in bookmarks wasn't really that useful (if it ever was) for
most of users, so I'm a bit surprised they kept support for RSS for so long. I
would've not been surprised if they dropped support for it around the same
time they killed e.g. Gopher-related code (Firefox 4, c. 2011).

------
gonmf
Classical Mozilla

------
dcomp
As long as it still renders the RSS feed in a reasonable manner and doesn't
default to just an XML dump.

I guess it's not too bad.

Edit: actually it looks like they're removing the reader as well. Guess I'll
have to find a extension. Shouldn't be too hard

~~~
dblohm7
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/livemarks/)

