5 ms·

What's your point? A great technology should be abandoned just because it's not popular? Maybe I am not average but the fact is that RSS is very helpful to many

by cJ0th 8y ago

What's your point? A great technology should be abandoned just because it's not popular? Maybe I am not average but the fact is that RSS is very helpful to many professionals like programmers, scientists or journalists on a daily basis. What's the alternative? Should we manually skim e-mail newsletters that don't follow a strict structure? Should we all get our information off facebook? Should we waste our time checking a bunch if not hundreds of websites manually every day?

Reedx 8y ago
I agree it has utility and not saying whether it should be abandoned or not. I just meant that an anecdote doesn't prove anything and doesn't necessarily apply to the average population. Mozilla knows better than we do.
notatoad 8y ago
What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them? I think RSS is cool too, but that's not an argument for why browsers should integrate RSS feeds in their menu structures. Whether RSS is dead or not isn't an argument as to whether firefox's live bookmarks feature should continue existing. People don't use it, so it got pulled.
- zajd 8y ago
  > do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them? It's not unused, but sure, keep repeating that to yourself. And yes, they should continue including it. What exactly do they gain by removing it? There's a reason Feedly has millions of users and it's not because RSS is dead and nobody cares.
  - syockit 8y ago
    > What exactly do they gain by removing it? More developer resources?
- apostacy 8y ago
  > What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features[?] YES. Yes even if not a single person uses it. If it makes sense and might be useful, and especially if it is already there, then it should stay. I haven't used POP3 in about a decade, and only used FTP a few times in ten years, but I would be miffed if they were deprecated. I want the option to use them if I must. That availability is itself a feature. And RSS is a hell of a lot more useful and common. And I know that if they remove it that there almost certainly wasn't a sound technical reason for it, it was just someone being judgmental about what features should be available. Or, what about a spare tire? Isn't it wasteful that our cars are burdened with carrying around all this extra weight in the trunk? How many time in your life have you actually needed to use a spare tire? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that <5% of drivers ever even touch the thing, and yet every car has one! In this day and age, you should just call a tow truck. Spare tires a relic of the time before cellphones. By your logic, the only features that are worthwhile are popular features. Nearly everything starts out with 0 users. Why bother making anything? Should something get axed the moment it dips in popularity? I know that these days the answer of course is yes. FYI, the only reason that companies like Apple and Google are so aggressive with feature culling and deprecation is to protect their platforms and help dominate the market. That is it. When OSS copies the decisions of for profit companies then that is just a cargo cult mentality.
  - roca 8y ago
    Supporting even completely unused features creates significant costs, including: -- Tests for those features still run regularly -- Increased download size -- Increased runtime code memory usage (it's impossible to completely separate code pages for unused features from used features) -- The code must be maintained as interfaces they depend on are refactored -- Attackers will find exploitable bugs that harm users and must be fixed
    - apostacy 8y ago
      We are talking about the RSS reader. How many extra megabytes do you think it will add to the download?
  - 8y ago

by cJ0th 8y ago

Reedx 8y ago

I agree it has utility and not saying whether it should be abandoned or not. I just meant that an anecdote doesn't prove anything and doesn't necessarily apply to the average population. Mozilla knows better than we do.

notatoad 8y ago

What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them? I think RSS is cool too, but that's not an argument for why browsers should integrate RSS feeds in their menu structures. Whether RSS is dead or not isn't an argument as to whether firefox's live bookmarks feature should continue existing. People don't use it, so it got pulled.

zajd 8y ago
> do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them? It's not unused, but sure, keep repeating that to yourself. And yes, they should continue including it. What exactly do they gain by removing it? There's a reason Feedly has millions of users and it's not because RSS is dead and nobody cares.
- syockit 8y ago
  > What exactly do they gain by removing it? More developer resources?
apostacy 8y ago
> What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features[?] YES. Yes even if not a single person uses it. If it makes sense and might be useful, and especially if it is already there, then it should stay. I haven't used POP3 in about a decade, and only used FTP a few times in ten years, but I would be miffed if they were deprecated. I want the option to use them if I must. That availability is itself a feature. And RSS is a hell of a lot more useful and common. And I know that if they remove it that there almost certainly wasn't a sound technical reason for it, it was just someone being judgmental about what features should be available. Or, what about a spare tire? Isn't it wasteful that our cars are burdened with carrying around all this extra weight in the trunk? How many time in your life have you actually needed to use a spare tire? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that <5% of drivers ever even touch the thing, and yet every car has one! In this day and age, you should just call a tow truck. Spare tires a relic of the time before cellphones. By your logic, the only features that are worthwhile are popular features. Nearly everything starts out with 0 users. Why bother making anything? Should something get axed the moment it dips in popularity? I know that these days the answer of course is yes. FYI, the only reason that companies like Apple and Google are so aggressive with feature culling and deprecation is to protect their platforms and help dominate the market. That is it. When OSS copies the decisions of for profit companies then that is just a cargo cult mentality.
- roca 8y ago
  Supporting even completely unused features creates significant costs, including: -- Tests for those features still run regularly -- Increased download size -- Increased runtime code memory usage (it's impossible to completely separate code pages for unused features from used features) -- The code must be maintained as interfaces they depend on are refactored -- Attackers will find exploitable bugs that harm users and must be fixed
  - apostacy 8y ago
    We are talking about the RSS reader. How many extra megabytes do you think it will add to the download?
- 8y ago