10 ms·

Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader from Firefox

145 points by HelenePhisher 8y ago

treve 8y ago
It's understandable that this is done, given the usage numbers. I've never really used live bookmarks in the past 10 years, but I always had the 'feed' navigation button appear if a site has a feed. It still saddens me, because it's another nail in the coffin for an important technology. It's technologies like Atom/RSS that once broke us out of silos. We're back in the silo though, and I would love Mozilla to lead the front in breaking us out again. Maybe it's not RSS and Atom that lead us into the next revolution. Maybe it's activityfeed? I want it badly though.
- goalieca 8y ago
  RSS is alive and doing very well. Just not in traditional readers.
  - TillE 8y ago
    It's nice that iTunes never grabbed the opportunity to lock in podcasts to their own system. They probably could've done it ten years ago. Instead we have their good solution of a few optional extensions to the mandatory RSS feed.
    - wkearney99 8y ago
      Oh they tried but bumbling incompetence and contractors saved the day. That and the bigger problem of iTunes being such a goatf*ck piece of software. It's like the contractors working on it were trying deliberately to make it bad.
      - krageon 8y ago
        You are allowed to say goatfuck on the internet. Nobody will punish you for it and I hazard to say the less self-censoring, the better.
  - remram 8y ago
    I wouldn't call the "live bookmark" feature a "traditional reader" either. It is actually pretty unique, and doesn't scale very well.
- gergles 8y ago
  The people most likely to use these features I imagine are also the ones most likely to turn off telemetry. Making decisions to remove long-standing features based on telemetry seems short-sighted to me because of this reason.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    In a sense those users explicitly opt out from having their voices heard. Any other way to gather information on feature usage would most likely be massively more biased than direct telemetry.
    - dsr_ 8y ago
      In my anecdotal experience, this is a common problem: if your open-source project has an option for spying on users, the ones who pay attention to privacy and security opt out. Debian's popcon survey has a worse version of this problem: it reports back the packages in use -- and nobody setting up a bunch of servers wants to leak that information, so they only get home users reporting in.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    Also the ones most likely to be able to install an extension to do the same job. That said, if you want Mozilla (or other organisations, for that matter) to make decisions based on how you're using their products, then it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation from their side that you tell them about that usage, i.e. through telemetry.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      It's a trust issue. Too many companies cannot be trusted to make software that truly, effectively, anonymizes data before it leaves your device. I trust Mozilla, but I understand others don't. And it's part of the way that we lose trust in general when abuse is so common.
    - SllX 8y ago
      There are other means of getting usage data than just telemetry. Depending on it when you know some percentage of your userbase has turned it off is disregarding those users completely. At the same time, people disable telemetry because as we've come to understand much more clearly as a society (and some of us already knew long before "recently"), there is too much data floating around about us as it is. Not all of it stored in a secured, anonymized fashion even if the organization in question claims to. People are skeptical of automatic telemetry data collection for good reason.
- sothym 8y ago
  I still use rss with a self-hosted tt-rss instance.
- bad_user 8y ago
  First of all some of us use RSS just fine. And RSS is in fact still mainstream, at least for podcasts. I don't use Firefox's live bookmarks. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that Firefox has a "Subscribe to RSS" button and you can register your own RSS Reader such that Firefox can directly subscribe your RSS Reader when it finds a RSS link in the page's HTML. I hope that doesn't go away and right now I'm assuming that it does. And to contradict you ... no, it's in no way understandable. I understood many choices from Mozilla, even their integration of Pocket which I like, or their integration of DRM, which I assume they had no choice in the matter. But not this. If popularity is an actual argument, with complete disregard for that percentage of users that cares about RSS, then we should just switch to Chrome. Chrome has an extension in its app store btw that does what I want. I might as well switch to Chrome now and be done with it. Mozilla would do well to appeal to the long tail, they can't afford not to.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  While i am sad to see Mozilla strip even more out of Firefox, live bookmarks was perhaps a real poor take on rss support. First of all it didn't cache old entries. second it didn't update unless the entry on the bookmarks was expanded. third you didn't know what was read outside of a subtle icon change. RSS more properly belongs in a email client like ui...
  - diggernet 8y ago
    Precisely why I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader.
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Only problem i have bumped into is easily sending a entry to the browser without reaching for the mouse.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  Bullshit. It was a complete and working feature. The timing of this removal is suspect as fuck.
dh-g 8y ago
I replicated FF live bookmark handling for Chrome years ago via an extension. This morning I laughed when I saw users opening github issues asking to port that extension to FF. extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jpgagcapnkccceppgljfpoadahaopjdb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jp...
- billiam 8y ago
  Best part of all is that Web Extensions API is totally based on the Chrome extension API so it should be easy! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!
  - mandelbulb 8y ago
    Well, Foxish had been ported on the same day https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
ccnafr 8y ago
It's not really such a big deal. Everyone uses dedicated feed readers nowadays. Feedly mainly.
- ridgewell 8y ago
  More than anything, I think it was just a nice to have feature. Not many people were really using it as a dedicated RSS reader, but if you ever just wanted to extract an MP3 from a podcast or get an overview of what a blog was writing recently (if there wasn't an easy way of accessing that), it came in handy.
nuclearburrito 8y ago
In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. They should support the standards, but not be everything but the kitchen sink. I don't want Pocket, which is what I think they are trying to drive people towards. I've disabled it under about:config. I want a browser. More and more, I find myself using uzbl-tabbed under Arch Linux because it does one thing well. I use Mozilla now for multimedia and that's about it. My bank also balks at uzbl-tabbed. As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. It just simply works.
- WalterGR 8y ago
  > In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. ... As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. As with every tool, what counts as that “one thing” is entirely subjective, in the eye of the beholder, highly personal, often arbitrary. Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I’ve seen recently - documents, files, URLs? It’s the exact same debate about whether programs should do any of the things that can be handled by tmux / GNU screen / readline / whatever. For you, the “one thing” browsers should do maps exactly to what you think counts as “one thing.” To others, that might include Firefox’s RSS support, and leave out something you consider essential, calling it “bloat” and against the spirit of Unix.
  - jsgo 8y ago
    > Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I’ve seen recently - documents, files, URLs? If my operating system could handle those (and that's kind of a neat prospect, actually, though maybe concerning that the host OS is actively "snooping" on what we're doing in a client application), I'd be totally pleased with the browser being just a host for a web engine. Unfortunately, they don't, so tabs, history, etc. which are fairly integral to the web itself are worth supporting directly within the browser. Some use RSS, some don't. Some use Pocket or similar services, some don't. I have no issue with these being recommended extensions as they can boost the browsing experience for the user, but I agree they shouldn't be in the browser itself. Now, if with Chrome/Firefox/whatever they allowed more granular customization of components like tabs such that the tab UI by a hypothetical tab management extension is 1:1 with Safari's implementation, I'd be beyond thrilled.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Can't say I was even aware of it, much less used it. I have a perfectly serviceable FOSS application to be my desktop Feed Reader (Liferea), but to be honest I never really use that, either. Wading through my news feed is now an activity that I do almost exclusively through Feedly on my phone or tablet, usually either while I'm having my morning coffee or as I'm winding down for bed. I suppose if Mozilla had done a better job of advertising it I might've given it a second look. FWIW, Firefox's "Reader Mode" is fantastic, and if they had somehow combined that with the RSS reader, particularly on Firefox Mobile for Android where I do the majority of my reading, I probably would've been all-in. I don't believe Feedly is open source, so having one that is would be preferable in case Feedly ever decides to go the way of Google Reader and/or Pulse (which just went to garbage after LinkedIn bought it).
- detaro 8y ago
  Yeah, pretty much an instance of a feature neglected for ages, so it's not surprising it isn't relevant now.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  A very long time ago, iirc, Firefox installed with the bookmarks toolbar default on and a live bookmark example with some help text and populated with BBC news (Perhaps different in non-GB locales). From that start it's been successively made more discrete (i.e. buried) with subsequent releases. They defaulted the bookmarks bar to off and at some point removed the pre-created example.
rauhl 8y ago
I’m pretty sad to see it go, although to be honest I’ve been using elfeed for awhile now. I wish that the promise of RSS & the open web had been fulfilled.
pmlnr 8y ago
They could have done this when they got rid of the RSS icon in the URL bar.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  They didn't get rid of it, they just removed it from the interface by default. Now they're getting rid of it, i.e. you can't simply add it to the button back in. But of course, there will probably be an extension that does that.
  - yborg 8y ago
    >there will probably be an extension that does that And then another draconian compatibility-breaking change to the extensions APIs will permanently disable said extension a year later...
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      The good news is that Firefox somewhat recently switched to a proper API (i.e. WebExtensions), which should prevent that from happening. But I guess you're probably sour from WebExtensions being introduced in the first place. Which I can understand, because it did lead to many extensions no longer working. Still, it should lead to that problem being one of the past.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    Most feed readers these days will go and fetch the RSS link from the header if you copy a URL in. It's not great for promoting RSS, but it's not enough friction to stop me from using it.
  - severine 8y ago
    Awesome RSS! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://shgysk8zer0.github.io/posts/2018/03/02/awesome-rss/ https://shgysk8zer0.github.io/posts/2018/03/02/awesome-rss/
- 8y ago
severine 8y ago
I'm a heavy user of live bookmarks. Best way to check headlines or blog updates quickly. It's sad to see it go, but I'm sure an extension (hi, dh-g!) will surface, and the situation for fans of the feature will remain the same or even better in the end. Still the best browser for the savvy user.
fusiongyro 8y ago
I found this feature perplexing even when I did use RSS.
GordonS 8y ago
I've been using a Firefox extension to read RSS feeds for years - the built-in RSS functionality has always been far too basic for real use. Still, I'd have much rather seen Mozilla build better RSS functionality, rather than simply removing it altogether.
- tunap 8y ago
  "far too basic for real use." For some, myself included, basic is all we want. IF something piques my interest, I will open it. Otherwise, I have a basic idea of current events in < 10 minutes and get on w/ life... sans cookies, tracking, ads, java heavy page loads, etc. Engineering 101: Simple is the most advanced technology. It is not the most profitable, however. YMMV.
  - severine 8y ago
    I agree with all you say, except for one thing. When I installed the fantastic Cookie Autodelete extension [links below], I had it with the option for allowing notifications on deletion, and I realised that all my live bookmarks were setting cookies. No big deal, but thought you'd like to know. [1] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/fhcgjolkccmbidfldomjliifgaodjagh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...
    - tunap 8y ago
      Thanks, TIL. I presume Ctrl+Shift+Del(all) & BleachBit address such trackers, I use former closing tabs & latter when I close Pale Moon. I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand...
      - severine 8y ago
        > I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand... It's not their main mission, I think... Some info: - uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827 - NoScript: https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=86435&hilit=cookies#p86435 https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=...
JohnTHaller 8y ago
Could they, perhaps, leave the indication of a feed being available for a given site as an optional component of the UI with the ability to pass to things like Feedly? I find it very useful.
- severine 8y ago
  I'm reading this as ending support for live bookmarks and feed preview, but not necessarily for the "open with" feature in Preferences > General > Applications that lets you pick a reader; just that Live Boomarks wouldn't be one option Anyone knows for sure?
  - bscphil 8y ago
    I expect this to still work, but I think GP and I want the "subscribe to this page" button to still work, and send the rss link to the user's third party reader. It's nice to have rss links open in the right app, but there are a ton of sites that don't have an obvious rss link on the page, but it's embedded in the html because of the spec.
    - severine 8y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254
a3n 8y ago
I use it to keep track of my pinboard tags, each of which has an associated RSS feed.
netghost 8y ago
For what it's worth, I just recently released a simple feed reader that sits in Firefox's sidebar. It's meant to blend in as much as possible in the vein of the older Firefox plugin Sage. You can import OPML files from all your favorite sources (probably). Extension is here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-reader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re... The full source is here: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook Even if you don't fancy using it, you may find the source handy if you want to build an extension yourself. Also if you're interested, I'd love feedback, suggestions and bug reports.
breput 8y ago
FWIW, there is a very nice sidebar-based Firefox RSS add-on called Drop Feeds - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/ It is very similar to the pre-WebExtensions Sage/SageToo/Sage++ add-ons.
jeffbax 8y ago
I don't think browsers make the best feed readers, but it'd be nice if they at least offered a button to detect them by default. I guess its fine to want an extension to do that, but anything that gives RSS more visibility is a win to me, even if its best consumed in a different app.
- severine 8y ago
  > a button to detect them by default https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
  - genericid 8y ago
    > by default
onli 8y ago
I hope feed rendering will still work. Live bookmarks where a bit cumbersome anyway, but feeds should still be properly rendered. They are an important part of the web. Maybe this cleanup can be used to bring back the rss icon in the url bar and to link it with a better way to subscribe to feeds in a web based rss reader?
bennyp101 8y ago
I actually use this feature quite a bit, I have various sites (HN included) in my toolbar so it makes it nice and easy to have a quick look and see if there is something interesting. Hopefully there will be a nice simple replacement extension (or maybe it will give me a chance to make something myself!)
- alyandon 8y ago
  I use this feature for about a dozen or so sites with RSS feeds. It's nice to have essentially a dynamic bookmark that refreshes periodically to directly access articles and I'm saddened to see that this feature is going away.
- mtberatwork 8y ago
  This is also how I see what's new on HN and other sites I subscribe to. I've been a FF user since the early days and I've always assumed the other major browsers supported live bookmarks by default. I'm a bit shocked to find out that this was only a FF feature.
megous 8y ago
Also removed in the next version is The Developer Toolbar (accessed with Shift+F2). Another thing I never used or knew existed. :)
- superkuh 8y ago
  It's been obvious since Firefox 37 that Mozilla no longer cares about "power users" or the web in general. Every step since then has been removing features and removing customization in a race to the bottom (w/Chrome) for making a safe shell for grandma to run JS web apps.
- lakechfoma 8y ago
  edit: apparently the exit _menu option_ cleanly closes all windows...woops. I only use this to restart the browser cleanly when I have multiple windows open. I use the "restore tabs/windows from last time" option and I don't see how else to close/restart ALL windows natively within FF. Guess I'll go back to killing it.
  - bscphil 8y ago
    Funny, I used to have an extension for restarting the browser, but those all broke when they left XUL behind. I care enough about it that I'm patching and building myself to get a restart button (and some other stuff).
  - Rondom 8y ago
    Under Linux, that's done by Ctrl+Q (provided that you have set up Firefox to restore your previous session on restart).
- retox 8y ago
  Is the developer toolbar the only native way to clear cookies still?
  - yorwba 8y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "native" but in about:preferences#privacy you can click "clear history" and select "cookies" to clear them.
infinityplus1 8y ago
It's the first thing I use whenever I open Firefox since years. Feeling sad about it
nachtigall 8y ago
I am a big fan of RSS feeds but have never used the built-in reader, but the add-on brief. Highly recommended to follows blogs, reddit or any kind of forum: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/
dwheeler 8y ago
I'm concerned about this, because its removal makes it harder for basic users to use RSS/Atom. The web has become unreasonably centralized, and feed readers + RSS is tool that enables the web to be more decentralized. Yes, some people can install a separate reader, but many can't, and Feedly (etc.) provide more features than some people need. Some people really do need only the basics.
simion314 8y ago
I see many recommending extensions but IMO is a good idea to minimize the number of extensions you use, if it was a Mozilla or other trustworthy entity behind the extension then it should be safer to install it.
- severine 8y ago
  But wasn't one of the points of the move to Web Extensions/API redesign/enhanced Mozilla review process, that extensions would be more trustworthy?
  - simion314 8y ago
    Yeah, maybe but I don't think you can 100% trust extensions, an extension can read all the content on your pages, they can do network calls so it is always a risk.
romdev 8y ago
It's hard to imagine using a stripped down browser-based feed reader after using an excellent dedicated application like NewsBlur. Did FireFox synchronize your read stories across devices?
tlynchpin 8y ago
As a long time Mozilla user, I recently found Waterfox[1] and it is terrific! I found out about it here on HN so here I am spreading the Good News. [1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
manicdee 8y ago
I love following these "RSS is dead" discussions from my RSS feed reader.
smileypete 8y ago
Still on Firefox 55 because I love the LiveClick RSS addon which didn't survive the switch to WebExtensions. More and more I'm using AutoIt to provide extra features instead of a collection of addons, so I'm thinking doing the same for LiveClick.
Grumbledour 8y ago
I feel this is a disgrace! Not the removal of live bookmarks, it's fair to expect this to be an extension, but the removal of feed discovery. of course, it wont matter that much to most people, since Mozilla removed that functionality from the URL bar years ago and put it into a button that is not visible by default, thus making sure Joe Average never needs to think about what an RSS feed could be. I would argue that started the trend many sites picked up, where there are still feeds available, but they are nearly impossible to find unless you stumble upon some old sub page via a search engine that used to advertise them and someone forgot to delete it when it was unlinked. Honestly, RSS is great and I don't see it dying anytime soon, but there will also be no more adaption, because it is just such a technical topic and is nearly impossible to discover the feeds and how they work unless someone knowledgeable shows it to you. And for a web browser to have no option of displaying available feeds to the user is just embarrassing. But then, that also was the death of micro formats as useful to end-users, having no UI available to interact meaningfully.
WhyNotHugo 8y ago
I've moved to using rss2email YEARS ago. The basic idea is that RSS gets polled, and you get an email for new entries. Your email client handles read/unread status, has labels/filtering, and can keep stuff in sync across devices. Plus, you've like A MILLION clients to choose from. I run this as a cron script, but I'm pretty sure there's very cheap services out there that do the same (if not, here's a good business idea).
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
Wow, what a "fuck you, users".

145 points by HelenePhisher 8y ago

It's understandable that this is done, given the usage numbers. I've never really used live bookmarks in the past 10 years, but I always had the 'feed' navigation button appear if a site has a feed. It still saddens me, because it's another nail in the coffin for an important technology. It's technologies like Atom/RSS that once broke us out of silos. We're back in the silo though, and I would love Mozilla to lead the front in breaking us out again. Maybe it's not RSS and Atom that lead us into the next revolution. Maybe it's activityfeed? I want it badly though.

goalieca 8y ago
RSS is alive and doing very well. Just not in traditional readers.
- TillE 8y ago
  It's nice that iTunes never grabbed the opportunity to lock in podcasts to their own system. They probably could've done it ten years ago. Instead we have their good solution of a few optional extensions to the mandatory RSS feed.
  - wkearney99 8y ago
    Oh they tried but bumbling incompetence and contractors saved the day. That and the bigger problem of iTunes being such a goatf*ck piece of software. It's like the contractors working on it were trying deliberately to make it bad.
    - krageon 8y ago
      You are allowed to say goatfuck on the internet. Nobody will punish you for it and I hazard to say the less self-censoring, the better.
- remram 8y ago
  I wouldn't call the "live bookmark" feature a "traditional reader" either. It is actually pretty unique, and doesn't scale very well.
gergles 8y ago
The people most likely to use these features I imagine are also the ones most likely to turn off telemetry. Making decisions to remove long-standing features based on telemetry seems short-sighted to me because of this reason.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  In a sense those users explicitly opt out from having their voices heard. Any other way to gather information on feature usage would most likely be massively more biased than direct telemetry.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    In my anecdotal experience, this is a common problem: if your open-source project has an option for spying on users, the ones who pay attention to privacy and security opt out. Debian's popcon survey has a worse version of this problem: it reports back the packages in use -- and nobody setting up a bunch of servers wants to leak that information, so they only get home users reporting in.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Also the ones most likely to be able to install an extension to do the same job. That said, if you want Mozilla (or other organisations, for that matter) to make decisions based on how you're using their products, then it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation from their side that you tell them about that usage, i.e. through telemetry.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    It's a trust issue. Too many companies cannot be trusted to make software that truly, effectively, anonymizes data before it leaves your device. I trust Mozilla, but I understand others don't. And it's part of the way that we lose trust in general when abuse is so common.
  - SllX 8y ago
    There are other means of getting usage data than just telemetry. Depending on it when you know some percentage of your userbase has turned it off is disregarding those users completely. At the same time, people disable telemetry because as we've come to understand much more clearly as a society (and some of us already knew long before "recently"), there is too much data floating around about us as it is. Not all of it stored in a secured, anonymized fashion even if the organization in question claims to. People are skeptical of automatic telemetry data collection for good reason.
sothym 8y ago
I still use rss with a self-hosted tt-rss instance.
bad_user 8y ago
First of all some of us use RSS just fine. And RSS is in fact still mainstream, at least for podcasts. I don't use Firefox's live bookmarks. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that Firefox has a "Subscribe to RSS" button and you can register your own RSS Reader such that Firefox can directly subscribe your RSS Reader when it finds a RSS link in the page's HTML. I hope that doesn't go away and right now I'm assuming that it does. And to contradict you ... no, it's in no way understandable. I understood many choices from Mozilla, even their integration of Pocket which I like, or their integration of DRM, which I assume they had no choice in the matter. But not this. If popularity is an actual argument, with complete disregard for that percentage of users that cares about RSS, then we should just switch to Chrome. Chrome has an extension in its app store btw that does what I want. I might as well switch to Chrome now and be done with it. Mozilla would do well to appeal to the long tail, they can't afford not to.
digi_owl 8y ago
While i am sad to see Mozilla strip even more out of Firefox, live bookmarks was perhaps a real poor take on rss support. First of all it didn't cache old entries. second it didn't update unless the entry on the bookmarks was expanded. third you didn't know what was read outside of a subtle icon change. RSS more properly belongs in a email client like ui...
- diggernet 8y ago
  Precisely why I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Only problem i have bumped into is easily sending a entry to the browser without reaching for the mouse.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
Bullshit. It was a complete and working feature. The timing of this removal is suspect as fuck.

dh-g 8y ago

I replicated FF live bookmark handling for Chrome years ago via an extension. This morning I laughed when I saw users opening github issues asking to port that extension to FF. extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jpgagcapnkccceppgljfpoadahaopjdb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jp...

billiam 8y ago
Best part of all is that Web Extensions API is totally based on the Chrome extension API so it should be easy! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!
- mandelbulb 8y ago
  Well, Foxish had been ported on the same day https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

ccnafr 8y ago

It's not really such a big deal. Everyone uses dedicated feed readers nowadays. Feedly mainly.

ridgewell 8y ago
More than anything, I think it was just a nice to have feature. Not many people were really using it as a dedicated RSS reader, but if you ever just wanted to extract an MP3 from a podcast or get an overview of what a blog was writing recently (if there wasn't an easy way of accessing that), it came in handy.

nuclearburrito 8y ago

In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. They should support the standards, but not be everything but the kitchen sink. I don't want Pocket, which is what I think they are trying to drive people towards. I've disabled it under about:config. I want a browser. More and more, I find myself using uzbl-tabbed under Arch Linux because it does one thing well. I use Mozilla now for multimedia and that's about it. My bank also balks at uzbl-tabbed. As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. It just simply works.

WalterGR 8y ago
> In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. ... As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. As with every tool, what counts as that “one thing” is entirely subjective, in the eye of the beholder, highly personal, often arbitrary. Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I’ve seen recently - documents, files, URLs? It’s the exact same debate about whether programs should do any of the things that can be handled by tmux / GNU screen / readline / whatever. For you, the “one thing” browsers should do maps exactly to what you think counts as “one thing.” To others, that might include Firefox’s RSS support, and leave out something you consider essential, calling it “bloat” and against the spirit of Unix.
- jsgo 8y ago
  > Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I’ve seen recently - documents, files, URLs? If my operating system could handle those (and that's kind of a neat prospect, actually, though maybe concerning that the host OS is actively "snooping" on what we're doing in a client application), I'd be totally pleased with the browser being just a host for a web engine. Unfortunately, they don't, so tabs, history, etc. which are fairly integral to the web itself are worth supporting directly within the browser. Some use RSS, some don't. Some use Pocket or similar services, some don't. I have no issue with these being recommended extensions as they can boost the browsing experience for the user, but I agree they shouldn't be in the browser itself. Now, if with Chrome/Firefox/whatever they allowed more granular customization of components like tabs such that the tab UI by a hypothetical tab management extension is 1:1 with Safari's implementation, I'd be beyond thrilled.

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

Can't say I was even aware of it, much less used it. I have a perfectly serviceable FOSS application to be my desktop Feed Reader (Liferea), but to be honest I never really use that, either. Wading through my news feed is now an activity that I do almost exclusively through Feedly on my phone or tablet, usually either while I'm having my morning coffee or as I'm winding down for bed. I suppose if Mozilla had done a better job of advertising it I might've given it a second look. FWIW, Firefox's "Reader Mode" is fantastic, and if they had somehow combined that with the RSS reader, particularly on Firefox Mobile for Android where I do the majority of my reading, I probably would've been all-in. I don't believe Feedly is open source, so having one that is would be preferable in case Feedly ever decides to go the way of Google Reader and/or Pulse (which just went to garbage after LinkedIn bought it).

detaro 8y ago
Yeah, pretty much an instance of a feature neglected for ages, so it's not surprising it isn't relevant now.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
A very long time ago, iirc, Firefox installed with the bookmarks toolbar default on and a live bookmark example with some help text and populated with BBC news (Perhaps different in non-GB locales). From that start it's been successively made more discrete (i.e. buried) with subsequent releases. They defaulted the bookmarks bar to off and at some point removed the pre-created example.

rauhl 8y ago

I’m pretty sad to see it go, although to be honest I’ve been using elfeed for awhile now. I wish that the promise of RSS & the open web had been fulfilled.

pmlnr 8y ago

They could have done this when they got rid of the RSS icon in the URL bar.

Vinnl 8y ago
They didn't get rid of it, they just removed it from the interface by default. Now they're getting rid of it, i.e. you can't simply add it to the button back in. But of course, there will probably be an extension that does that.
- yborg 8y ago
  >there will probably be an extension that does that And then another draconian compatibility-breaking change to the extensions APIs will permanently disable said extension a year later...
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    The good news is that Firefox somewhat recently switched to a proper API (i.e. WebExtensions), which should prevent that from happening. But I guess you're probably sour from WebExtensions being introduced in the first place. Which I can understand, because it did lead to many extensions no longer working. Still, it should lead to that problem being one of the past.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  Most feed readers these days will go and fetch the RSS link from the header if you copy a URL in. It's not great for promoting RSS, but it's not enough friction to stop me from using it.
- severine 8y ago
  Awesome RSS! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://shgysk8zer0.github.io/posts/2018/03/02/awesome-rss/ https://shgysk8zer0.github.io/posts/2018/03/02/awesome-rss/
8y ago

severine 8y ago

I'm a heavy user of live bookmarks. Best way to check headlines or blog updates quickly. It's sad to see it go, but I'm sure an extension (hi, dh-g!) will surface, and the situation for fans of the feature will remain the same or even better in the end. Still the best browser for the savvy user.

fusiongyro 8y ago

I found this feature perplexing even when I did use RSS.

GordonS 8y ago

I've been using a Firefox extension to read RSS feeds for years - the built-in RSS functionality has always been far too basic for real use. Still, I'd have much rather seen Mozilla build better RSS functionality, rather than simply removing it altogether.

tunap 8y ago
"far too basic for real use." For some, myself included, basic is all we want. IF something piques my interest, I will open it. Otherwise, I have a basic idea of current events in < 10 minutes and get on w/ life... sans cookies, tracking, ads, java heavy page loads, etc. Engineering 101: Simple is the most advanced technology. It is not the most profitable, however. YMMV.
- severine 8y ago
  I agree with all you say, except for one thing. When I installed the fantastic Cookie Autodelete extension [links below], I had it with the option for allowing notifications on deletion, and I realised that all my live bookmarks were setting cookies. No big deal, but thought you'd like to know. [1] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/fhcgjolkccmbidfldomjliifgaodjagh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...
  - tunap 8y ago
    Thanks, TIL. I presume Ctrl+Shift+Del(all) & BleachBit address such trackers, I use former closing tabs & latter when I close Pale Moon. I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand...
    - severine 8y ago
      > I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand... It's not their main mission, I think... Some info: - uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827 https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827 - NoScript: https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=86435&hilit=cookies#p86435 https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=...

JohnTHaller 8y ago

Could they, perhaps, leave the indication of a feed being available for a given site as an optional component of the UI with the ability to pass to things like Feedly? I find it very useful.

severine 8y ago
I'm reading this as ending support for live bookmarks and feed preview, but not necessarily for the "open with" feature in Preferences > General > Applications that lets you pick a reader; just that Live Boomarks wouldn't be one option Anyone knows for sure?
- bscphil 8y ago
  I expect this to still work, but I think GP and I want the "subscribe to this page" button to still work, and send the rss link to the user's third party reader. It's nice to have rss links open in the right app, but there are a ton of sites that don't have an obvious rss link on the page, but it's embedded in the html because of the spec.
  - severine 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254

a3n 8y ago

I use it to keep track of my pinboard tags, each of which has an associated RSS feed.

netghost 8y ago

For what it's worth, I just recently released a simple feed reader that sits in Firefox's sidebar. It's meant to blend in as much as possible in the vein of the older Firefox plugin Sage. You can import OPML files from all your favorite sources (probably). Extension is here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-reader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re... The full source is here: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook Even if you don't fancy using it, you may find the source handy if you want to build an extension yourself. Also if you're interested, I'd love feedback, suggestions and bug reports.

breput 8y ago

FWIW, there is a very nice sidebar-based Firefox RSS add-on called Drop Feeds - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/ It is very similar to the pre-WebExtensions Sage/SageToo/Sage++ add-ons.

jeffbax 8y ago

I don't think browsers make the best feed readers, but it'd be nice if they at least offered a button to detect them by default. I guess its fine to want an extension to do that, but anything that gives RSS more visibility is a win to me, even if its best consumed in a different app.

severine 8y ago
> a button to detect them by default https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
- genericid 8y ago
  > by default

onli 8y ago

I hope feed rendering will still work. Live bookmarks where a bit cumbersome anyway, but feeds should still be properly rendered. They are an important part of the web. Maybe this cleanup can be used to bring back the rss icon in the url bar and to link it with a better way to subscribe to feeds in a web based rss reader?

bennyp101 8y ago

I actually use this feature quite a bit, I have various sites (HN included) in my toolbar so it makes it nice and easy to have a quick look and see if there is something interesting. Hopefully there will be a nice simple replacement extension (or maybe it will give me a chance to make something myself!)

alyandon 8y ago
I use this feature for about a dozen or so sites with RSS feeds. It's nice to have essentially a dynamic bookmark that refreshes periodically to directly access articles and I'm saddened to see that this feature is going away.
mtberatwork 8y ago
This is also how I see what's new on HN and other sites I subscribe to. I've been a FF user since the early days and I've always assumed the other major browsers supported live bookmarks by default. I'm a bit shocked to find out that this was only a FF feature.

megous 8y ago

Also removed in the next version is The Developer Toolbar (accessed with Shift+F2). Another thing I never used or knew existed. :)

superkuh 8y ago
It's been obvious since Firefox 37 that Mozilla no longer cares about "power users" or the web in general. Every step since then has been removing features and removing customization in a race to the bottom (w/Chrome) for making a safe shell for grandma to run JS web apps.
lakechfoma 8y ago
edit: apparently the exit _menu option_ cleanly closes all windows...woops. I only use this to restart the browser cleanly when I have multiple windows open. I use the "restore tabs/windows from last time" option and I don't see how else to close/restart ALL windows natively within FF. Guess I'll go back to killing it.
- bscphil 8y ago
  Funny, I used to have an extension for restarting the browser, but those all broke when they left XUL behind. I care enough about it that I'm patching and building myself to get a restart button (and some other stuff).
- Rondom 8y ago
  Under Linux, that's done by Ctrl+Q (provided that you have set up Firefox to restore your previous session on restart).
retox 8y ago
Is the developer toolbar the only native way to clear cookies still?
- yorwba 8y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "native" but in about:preferences#privacy you can click "clear history" and select "cookies" to clear them.

infinityplus1 8y ago

It's the first thing I use whenever I open Firefox since years. Feeling sad about it

nachtigall 8y ago

I am a big fan of RSS feeds but have never used the built-in reader, but the add-on brief. Highly recommended to follows blogs, reddit or any kind of forum: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

dwheeler 8y ago

I'm concerned about this, because its removal makes it harder for basic users to use RSS/Atom. The web has become unreasonably centralized, and feed readers + RSS is tool that enables the web to be more decentralized. Yes, some people can install a separate reader, but many can't, and Feedly (etc.) provide more features than some people need. Some people really do need only the basics.

simion314 8y ago

I see many recommending extensions but IMO is a good idea to minimize the number of extensions you use, if it was a Mozilla or other trustworthy entity behind the extension then it should be safer to install it.

severine 8y ago
But wasn't one of the points of the move to Web Extensions/API redesign/enhanced Mozilla review process, that extensions would be more trustworthy?
- simion314 8y ago
  Yeah, maybe but I don't think you can 100% trust extensions, an extension can read all the content on your pages, they can do network calls so it is always a risk.

romdev 8y ago

It's hard to imagine using a stripped down browser-based feed reader after using an excellent dedicated application like NewsBlur. Did FireFox synchronize your read stories across devices?

tlynchpin 8y ago

As a long time Mozilla user, I recently found Waterfox[1] and it is terrific! I found out about it here on HN so here I am spreading the Good News. [1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

manicdee 8y ago

I love following these "RSS is dead" discussions from my RSS feed reader.

smileypete 8y ago

Still on Firefox 55 because I love the LiveClick RSS addon which didn't survive the switch to WebExtensions. More and more I'm using AutoIt to provide extra features instead of a collection of addons, so I'm thinking doing the same for LiveClick.

Grumbledour 8y ago

I feel this is a disgrace! Not the removal of live bookmarks, it's fair to expect this to be an extension, but the removal of feed discovery. of course, it wont matter that much to most people, since Mozilla removed that functionality from the URL bar years ago and put it into a button that is not visible by default, thus making sure Joe Average never needs to think about what an RSS feed could be. I would argue that started the trend many sites picked up, where there are still feeds available, but they are nearly impossible to find unless you stumble upon some old sub page via a search engine that used to advertise them and someone forgot to delete it when it was unlinked. Honestly, RSS is great and I don't see it dying anytime soon, but there will also be no more adaption, because it is just such a technical topic and is nearly impossible to discover the feeds and how they work unless someone knowledgeable shows it to you. And for a web browser to have no option of displaying available feeds to the user is just embarrassing. But then, that also was the death of micro formats as useful to end-users, having no UI available to interact meaningfully.

WhyNotHugo 8y ago

I've moved to using rss2email YEARS ago. The basic idea is that RSS gets polled, and you get an email for new entries. Your email client handles read/unread status, has labels/filtering, and can keep stuff in sync across devices. Plus, you've like A MILLION clients to choose from. I run this as a cron script, but I'm pretty sure there's very cheap services out there that do the same (if not, here's a good business idea).

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

Wow, what a "fuck you, users".