15 ms·

Firefox removes RSS support

265 points by treve 8y ago

T3RMINATED 8y ago
Use Chrome boycott FireFox
bonzini 8y ago
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 8y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
andrewmcwatters 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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).
cecja 8y ago
Who needs RSS when there is pocket. /s
- ethana 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    You can turn those off easily enough: just click the gear in the top right of the newtab page.
- notriddle 8y ago
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API/Using_the_Notifications_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...
DrPhish 8y ago
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.
mandelbulb 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - h1d 8y ago
    I didn't know I could read news by looking at Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, RSS doesn't need to die but there's someone trying to kill it.
    - jarfil 8y ago
      RSS was never intended to serve content, it shouldn't be different from a Twitter feed full of "title, link, short summary" posts. Minus the comments.
  - mandelbulb 8y ago
    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 8y ago
dcomp 8y ago
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 8y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
cJ0th 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - cJ0th 8y ago
    RSS is not dead. I have many feeds that I auto-filter and check on a daily basis. Furthermore it is enabled by default on countless wordpress blogs. RSS is not complicated from an end user's point of view. But since it gives users more control to handle their information diet nobody poured money into a marketing campaign to make it more popular with "average users".
    - Reedx 8y ago
      As much as I love RSS (as someone that made and sold one of the first news aggregators), you're an outlier. If you asked 10 random people what RSS is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it? Edit: Ok, I should reframe this. An anecdote or random sampling doesn't matter when Mozilla knows how much the feature was actually being used.
      - Karunamon 8y ago
        I'm not sure "random people" are the target market for RSS.
gfody 8y ago
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 8y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
sattoshi 8y ago
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.
- chapium 8y ago
  Agreed. Remove the bloat.
- throwslack 8y ago
  The core function of a web browser shouldn't be to pretty print JSON either, yet they recently added that feature in core. I understand getting rid of XUL legacy cruft, but removing the RSS renderer/reader entirely with no plan other than "extensions will fix it" just leaves a bad taste.
  - pvorb 8y ago
    All browsers have been pretty-printing XML for a while. Adding JSON was long overdue. It might not be a core functionality of a browser, but all major browser vendors now accept that browsers are also development tools.
  - gpm 8y ago
    One of the core features of web browsers is web development tools. Pretty printing JSON is a extremely useful and versatile web development tool, and as such I consider it in scope.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      The core feature of a browser is browsing. Web dev tools are secondary. To a regular user who is not dev the removal of RSS is a loss. JSON is secondary. Firefox would make a mistake if they prioritized Dev tools over end user features.
      - tylerhou 8y ago
        How many regular users actually use RSS? To be honest, I don't think most devs use RSS, much less non-devs. Mozilla has a finite budget to allocate to features. Maybe they looked at usage rates and decided that RSS just wasn't an important feature, or other features were more important.
pvorb 8y ago
I so much hope they're not going to remove it from Thunderbird, which I'm using for consuming feeds.
- bittermang 8y ago
  RSS always made more sense to me in a mail client than a browser. Live bookmarks were useless to me.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I remember the original video introducing Google Reader. "Imagine an inbox for the web", the guy said.
  - vbarrielle 8y ago
    Indeed, that's why I'm using rss2email to follow my feeds.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Only problem was that Thunderbird insisted on opening the linked page via its internal gecko copy rather than being able to pass it on to a full browser...
- h1d 8y ago
  I'm sure you can find alternative apps.
Alex3917 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  That's more to do with Reddit being horrible and horribly moderated than any concrete problem with RSS, though.
  - jarfil 8y ago
    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.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  I honestly prefer text, at least for technical stuff, over a video. The videos often end up spending 10 minutes when all i want is some quick specs or a bullet point list.
krylon 8y ago
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 8y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
  - krylon 8y ago
    Thank you!
gonmf 8y ago
Classical Mozilla
guybedo 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - roryisok 8y ago
    Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I wouldn't consider having an optional paid version of your free product to be sketchy practice? I use feedly and I've never paid a penny. Sure, they've tried to upsell me a handful of times but that's hardly insidious. I mean I'm literally already using their product, what's wrong with offering me a pro account?
    - Nullabillity 8y ago
      That's not wrong in itself, but Feedly doesn't seem to even mention that there exists a pro version, or what it will cost.
      - rhizome 8y ago
        Neither does inoreader.
        Nullabillity 8y ago
        True.
Communitivity 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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.
sciurus 8y ago
The removal was previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821
tschellenbach 8y ago
If you're looking for a free alternative: http://github.com/getstream/winds http://github.com/getstream/winds
brian_herman 8y ago
If everyone hates what firefox/mozilla is doing why dont you guys stop writing blog posts and start making a fork of firefox/thunderbird?
- kirb 8y ago
  There's already plenty. I'm sure Pale Moon will keep RSS intact just as they're choosing to stay with the XUL-based extensions platform.
- h1d 8y ago
  Not sure why you're mad but Firefox doesn't exactly consist of 10 files.
  - brian_herman 8y ago
    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.
nickik 8y ago
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.
ourcat 8y ago
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.
4lch3m1st 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- sp332 8y ago
  I assume most RSS users have switched to other apps or webapps for feed management just as you have.
pnathan 8y ago
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 8y ago
  "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-recommendations https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...
  - pnathan 8y ago
    That only marginally makes it better...
    - rhizome 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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.
notriddle 8y ago
I've used RSS pretty heavily, but never Live Bookmarks. Who sticks a feed of news stories in a drop-down menu?!
- rhizome 8y ago
  Live Bookmarks always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
indefiniteWaste 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  > Parsing XML is such a hassle? Have you ever tried parsing RSS as produced in the real world? If you try to parse it with an actual XML parser, you are going to have a _very_ bad time.
matthewn 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        > Even bought a keyboard with a LCD to have my RSS headlines always available Woah, what keyboard was this?
  - mirceal 8y ago
    Agree. If you define 'dead' as is 'rare' and/or 'have not heard of anyone still using it' it's pretty much dead. It's a shame that it died (as consuming RSS feeds was an extremely efficient way of staying up-to-date without mindlessly browsing the web and checking tens/hundreds of sites). If you ask me Mozilla didn't kill RSS, they just updated their browser to reflect a reality. The reality is that most people don't use RSS and don't care about it. Who killed RSS? Going to go out on a limb here and say Google. Anyone remember Google Reader? That thing was amazing - I remember the days I used to go through all my feeds in under 10 minutes. .I guess it did not really fit Google's business model or it wasn't big enough to worth investing in, but if you ask me it was the closest Google came to having a social network.
BuckRogers 8y ago
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
marban 8y ago
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.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  What is the benefit of switching from Popurls to hvper? Honest question.
  - marban 8y ago
    Popurls was acquired many years ago and is now dead.
    - Baeocystin 8y ago
      That's a compelling reason. Thanks.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  [EDIT:] Suggested correction...
  - marban 8y ago
    Thanks, Corrected.
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Had a quick look at hvper.com. Surprised that Digg is at the top of the page. Digg to me does not seem an important source of content anymore. Do sites pay you to be higher up the page?
  - marban 8y ago
    It's still popular for mainstream. No, the initial order is something I base on experience and use.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
Mozilla has been corrupted by advertisers.
valeg 8y ago
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...
sershe 8y ago
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).
- sgillen 8y ago
  I think it’s possible the removing stuff is a function of constrained resources, Mozilla might just not have time to stay competitive with chrome/safari etc and maintain all these features at the same time.
- roca 8y ago
  Firefox is faster than Chrome on lots of benchmarks, and not controlled by/contributing to Google, and its extension system allows things like NoScript and Tree Style Tabs that Chrome doesn't.
- sp332 8y ago
  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.
8bitsrule 8y ago
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-.
frio 8y ago
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.
aaaaaaxax 8y ago
Userbase removes Firefox support
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Jach 8y ago
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...
nreece 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
znpy 8y ago
Mozilla: killing the open web.
vshabanov 8y ago
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.
TheCapeGreek 8y ago
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.
jacekm 8y ago
Ouch, I was actually using this feature. :( I hope Mozilla knows what they are doing...

265 points by treve 8y ago

Use Chrome boycott FireFox

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 8y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

andrewmcwatters 8y ago

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 8y ago
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).

cecja 8y ago

Who needs RSS when there is pocket. /s

ethana 8y ago
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 8y ago
  You can turn those off easily enough: just click the gear in the top right of the newtab page.
notriddle 8y ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API/Using_the_Notifications_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

DrPhish 8y ago

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.

mandelbulb 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- h1d 8y ago
  I didn't know I could read news by looking at Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, RSS doesn't need to die but there's someone trying to kill it.
  - jarfil 8y ago
    RSS was never intended to serve content, it shouldn't be different from a Twitter feed full of "title, link, short summary" posts. Minus the comments.
- mandelbulb 8y ago
  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 8y ago

dcomp 8y ago

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 8y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

cJ0th 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- cJ0th 8y ago
  RSS is not dead. I have many feeds that I auto-filter and check on a daily basis. Furthermore it is enabled by default on countless wordpress blogs. RSS is not complicated from an end user's point of view. But since it gives users more control to handle their information diet nobody poured money into a marketing campaign to make it more popular with "average users".
  - Reedx 8y ago
    As much as I love RSS (as someone that made and sold one of the first news aggregators), you're an outlier. If you asked 10 random people what RSS is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it? Edit: Ok, I should reframe this. An anecdote or random sampling doesn't matter when Mozilla knows how much the feature was actually being used.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      I'm not sure "random people" are the target market for RSS.

gfody 8y ago

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 8y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

sattoshi 8y ago

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.

chapium 8y ago
Agreed. Remove the bloat.
throwslack 8y ago
The core function of a web browser shouldn't be to pretty print JSON either, yet they recently added that feature in core. I understand getting rid of XUL legacy cruft, but removing the RSS renderer/reader entirely with no plan other than "extensions will fix it" just leaves a bad taste.
- pvorb 8y ago
  All browsers have been pretty-printing XML for a while. Adding JSON was long overdue. It might not be a core functionality of a browser, but all major browser vendors now accept that browsers are also development tools.
- gpm 8y ago
  One of the core features of web browsers is web development tools. Pretty printing JSON is a extremely useful and versatile web development tool, and as such I consider it in scope.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    The core feature of a browser is browsing. Web dev tools are secondary. To a regular user who is not dev the removal of RSS is a loss. JSON is secondary. Firefox would make a mistake if they prioritized Dev tools over end user features.
    - tylerhou 8y ago
      How many regular users actually use RSS? To be honest, I don't think most devs use RSS, much less non-devs. Mozilla has a finite budget to allocate to features. Maybe they looked at usage rates and decided that RSS just wasn't an important feature, or other features were more important.

pvorb 8y ago

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

bittermang 8y ago
RSS always made more sense to me in a mail client than a browser. Live bookmarks were useless to me.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  I remember the original video introducing Google Reader. "Imagine an inbox for the web", the guy said.
- vbarrielle 8y ago
  Indeed, that's why I'm using rss2email to follow my feeds.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  Only problem was that Thunderbird insisted on opening the linked page via its internal gecko copy rather than being able to pass it on to a full browser...
h1d 8y ago
I'm sure you can find alternative apps.

Alex3917 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
That's more to do with Reddit being horrible and horribly moderated than any concrete problem with RSS, though.
- jarfil 8y ago
  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.
digi_owl 8y ago
I honestly prefer text, at least for technical stuff, over a video. The videos often end up spending 10 minutes when all i want is some quick specs or a bullet point list.

krylon 8y ago

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 8y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
- krylon 8y ago
  Thank you!

gonmf 8y ago

Classical Mozilla

guybedo 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- roryisok 8y ago
  Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I wouldn't consider having an optional paid version of your free product to be sketchy practice? I use feedly and I've never paid a penny. Sure, they've tried to upsell me a handful of times but that's hardly insidious. I mean I'm literally already using their product, what's wrong with offering me a pro account?
  - Nullabillity 8y ago
    That's not wrong in itself, but Feedly doesn't seem to even mention that there exists a pro version, or what it will cost.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      Neither does inoreader.
      - Nullabillity 8y ago
        True.

Communitivity 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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.

sciurus 8y ago

The removal was previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17617821

tschellenbach 8y ago

If you're looking for a free alternative: http://github.com/getstream/winds http://github.com/getstream/winds

brian_herman 8y ago

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

kirb 8y ago
There's already plenty. I'm sure Pale Moon will keep RSS intact just as they're choosing to stay with the XUL-based extensions platform.
h1d 8y ago
Not sure why you're mad but Firefox doesn't exactly consist of 10 files.
- brian_herman 8y ago
  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.

nickik 8y ago

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.

ourcat 8y ago

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.

4lch3m1st 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sp332 8y ago
I assume most RSS users have switched to other apps or webapps for feed management just as you have.

pnathan 8y ago

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 8y ago
"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-recommendations https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...
- pnathan 8y ago
  That only marginally makes it better...
  - rhizome 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.

notriddle 8y ago

I've used RSS pretty heavily, but never Live Bookmarks. Who sticks a feed of news stories in a drop-down menu?!

rhizome 8y ago
Live Bookmarks always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.

indefiniteWaste 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
bzbarsky 8y ago
> Parsing XML is such a hassle? Have you ever tried parsing RSS as produced in the real world? If you try to parse it with an actual XML parser, you are going to have a _very_ bad time.

matthewn 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      > Even bought a keyboard with a LCD to have my RSS headlines always available Woah, what keyboard was this?
- mirceal 8y ago
  Agree. If you define 'dead' as is 'rare' and/or 'have not heard of anyone still using it' it's pretty much dead. It's a shame that it died (as consuming RSS feeds was an extremely efficient way of staying up-to-date without mindlessly browsing the web and checking tens/hundreds of sites). If you ask me Mozilla didn't kill RSS, they just updated their browser to reflect a reality. The reality is that most people don't use RSS and don't care about it. Who killed RSS? Going to go out on a limb here and say Google. Anyone remember Google Reader? That thing was amazing - I remember the days I used to go through all my feeds in under 10 minutes. .I guess it did not really fit Google's business model or it wasn't big enough to worth investing in, but if you ask me it was the closest Google came to having a social network.

BuckRogers 8y ago

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

marban 8y ago

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.

Baeocystin 8y ago
What is the benefit of switching from Popurls to hvper? Honest question.
- marban 8y ago
  Popurls was acquired many years ago and is now dead.
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    That's a compelling reason. Thanks.
jessaustin 8y ago
[EDIT:] Suggested correction...
- marban 8y ago
  Thanks, Corrected.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
Had a quick look at hvper.com. Surprised that Digg is at the top of the page. Digg to me does not seem an important source of content anymore. Do sites pay you to be higher up the page?
- marban 8y ago
  It's still popular for mainstream. No, the initial order is something I base on experience and use.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

Mozilla has been corrupted by advertisers.

valeg 8y ago

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...

sershe 8y ago

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).

sgillen 8y ago
I think it’s possible the removing stuff is a function of constrained resources, Mozilla might just not have time to stay competitive with chrome/safari etc and maintain all these features at the same time.
roca 8y ago
Firefox is faster than Chrome on lots of benchmarks, and not controlled by/contributing to Google, and its extension system allows things like NoScript and Tree Style Tabs that Chrome doesn't.
sp332 8y ago
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.

8bitsrule 8y ago

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-.

frio 8y ago

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.

aaaaaaxax 8y ago

Userbase removes Firefox support

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Jach 8y ago

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...

nreece 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

znpy 8y ago

Mozilla: killing the open web.

vshabanov 8y ago

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.

TheCapeGreek 8y ago

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.

jacekm 8y ago

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