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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' navigati
by 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 agoRSS is alive and doing very well. Just not in traditional readers.
- TillE 8y agoIt'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 agoOh 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 agoYou 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 agoI wouldn't call the "live bookmark" feature a "traditional reader" either. It is actually pretty unique, and doesn't scale very well.
- gergles 8y agoThe 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 agoIn 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 agoIn 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 agoAlso 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 agoIt'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 agoThere 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 agoI still use rss with a self-hosted tt-rss instance.
- bad_user 8y agoFirst 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 agoWhile 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...
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agoBullshit. It was a complete and working feature. The timing of this removal is suspect as fuck.