22 ms·

Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds

634 points by arayh 8y ago

clircle 8y ago
This is fine IMO. Thunderbird has better RSS support.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  Indeed, but the preview functionality was very useful for deciding whether to add a particular feed. Couldn't an XSLT + XSL stylesheet achive most of what the preview function would continue to be useful for?
  - blablabla123 8y ago
    True ;) https://github.com/concerto/concerto-simple-rss/wiki/Transforming-RSS-with-XSLT https://github.com/concerto/concerto-simple-rss/wiki/Transfo... Probably it suffices to use regular CSS after having it converted to XHTML...
  - cubano 8y ago
    You lost me at "...XSLT + XSL stylesheet..." I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with. On top of that, I still can't figure out exactly what problem its trying to solve, unless it purpose is job security to overpaid corporate contractors. We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just leave everything else be.
    - aikah 8y ago
      > I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with. It's because XSL is (recursive) functional programming, and most developers fight that fact trying to write imperative XSL. > We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just leave everything else be. Except you're not going to anything with JSON without writing Javascript code, since neither HTML or CSS do understand JSON. XSL works without a single line of Javasript and it is still supported by most browsers.
- newscracker 8y ago
  Let’s hope Thunderbird doesn’t lose feed reading/subscriptions soon. It does use large parts of Firefox code, and is already having issues in the post XUL world of Firefox.
- blablabla123 8y ago
  On macOS the font in the overview list is very small, at least on my laptop. As soon as I spot a better tool, I switch.
nachtigall 8y ago
For everyone looking for an alternative, Brief is an excellent add-on and I've been using it for the last 2 years: AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/ GitHub: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief https://github.com/brief-rss/brief It also includes a `Page action` so that an RSS icon is shown in the address bar on sites that support RSS/Atom. Great for discovery. Edit: Really strange, that `Brief` is missing in the curated list of readers that mozilla is linking to from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement... as alternative: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla/refined-reading/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla... (This looks like a really poor list) I've seen `Brief` recommended all the time by users. I don't really mind that Firefox removes its RSS support: It was missing many features anyway and had a really poor UX.
- yaantc 8y ago
  You can check Feedbro as an alternative to Brief: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader I was a long time user of Brief but moved away during the transition to webextensions. Although Brief worked there were some performance issues at the time (maybe solved now?). Both provide a similar user experience, and are the two best RSS readers I used so far.
  - skosch 8y ago
    Feedbro isn't open source, unfortunately. Brief is atrocious-looking out of the box, but you can enter your own CSS to override the styling. I've been pretty happy with it for the last few years.
- ePierre 8y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out! I'm currently using a feed reader installed on my web server so that I can access and sync my feeds between all my devices (home computer, work computer and smartphone). I use Firefox on all of my devices. Do you know if there is a way to sync the Brief database on different devices to keep them in sync?
unstuckdev 8y ago
I already searched feeds up in my feed reader, but only because the existing Firefox feature was poorly-integrated. I never could figure out how to have it redirect feeds to a reader. I wanted something like the way you can add search engines, but for third-party RSS readers. The feature as it was didn't work very well, and they obviously weren't going to improve it. So maybe it's for the best that they remove it.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  I think the feed reader had to register itself, using registerHandler with mimetype application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed . See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/2/Adding_feed_readers_to_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
mjw1007 8y ago
They say they're removing three things: - the built-in feed preview feature - the "live bookmarks" support - the subscription UI They give justifications for removing the first two, but not the third. Assuming by "subscription UI" they mean the support for following a link to an RSS feed and being given the option to send the URL to my preferred online feed reader, I think that's a great shame. Making it worse, that article says "that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons", with a link to what they say is a curated collection of readers, but none of the add-ons in that collection seem to replace the old subscription UI.
- cabaalis 8y ago
  One of the justifications from the article: > feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions. I'm curious the source of this data, seeing as I've switched to Firefox due to privacy concerns.
  - mjw1007 8y ago
    It's a silly justification anyway, as far as "feed previews" go: you preview a feed when you're thinking of subscribing to it, which isn't expected to be an everyday sort of action. I hope they wouldn't consider removing the option to select which application to use to open a particular file type, or to install an add-on, based on the percentage of sessions which use it.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Presumably it is from the users who didn't turn off usage data reporting.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Telemetry: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report Edit: I just found out that you can look at the collected data at about:telemetry
    - jasonjayr 8y ago
ccnafr 8y ago
They announced it months ago, in July: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-support-for-built-in-feed-reader-from-firefox/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-re... Here's the direct link to the internal doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_NrJXupcMilTPFFVpmnI/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_...
- bachmeier 8y ago
  > They announced it months ago And what percentage of Firefox users would pay attention to an announcement like that? Maybe this is the right decision, but they need to be careful.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  That internal doc is rather close to the article linked here, though I notice this piece of the rationale didn't make it into the public version: « Additionally, we are working on various initiatives that operate in the same area of focus as RSS/Atom feed support, like Pocket [...] »
hkai 8y ago
That's plainly sad. Next thing is websites will start removing rss, which means it will be harder for me to scrape them.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  I'm not sure any web dev is going to change their format because Firefox removed a feature. I've noticed my RSS content is scraped which makes gives me additional users. Removing RSS would hurt my website.
- sp332 8y ago
  Hopefully RSS users will move to readers with better UIs, increasing their visibility and attracting more people to using RSS.
mooreds 8y ago
No one likes to see features removed from something. But this seems really reasonable given alternatives and current usage. Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products. Another favorite quote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision." I'm betting this hurt (though a brief search through the FF mailing lists didn't turn up anything), but it seems like a good strategic decision.
- bachmeier 8y ago
  "Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products." That doesn't apply in this case. Saying no would have meant they never added it to Firefox. They said yes and now they're removing it. I'm not sure who said it, but there's a saying along the lines of "If you force users to change, they go shopping." Keep in mind that the definition of "great product" depends on the person. For the average user, a product that does what you want and keeps doing it is a great product, and anything else sucks.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    They also said that the features are used by less than 0.01% of users. I assume this is based on their own telemetry. So they're really not forcing very many users to change at all.
    - mjw1007 8y ago
      They said 0.01% of sessions. Feed preview isn't something you expect to use every session.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      No, they're just following the lure of analytics, to optimize things that should just be left alone.
- gmjoe 8y ago
thatsaguy 8y ago
RSS support in FF was always poor, but that was often enough to preview a subscription. It didn't need to be more complicated than that. On the other hand, or hay, Firefox Screenshots!! Sooo useful. Pocket? It doesn't get more federated than that! Or the dozen of DOM APIs added every year, which are probably much more complicated to maintain than a simple RSS preview feature. I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed. I've hated it for a while, especially as browsers move more and more away from "browsing" and become more and more of a half-ass "universal application runtime" combined with "something kinda like an X-server but not really". I kinda think we need to split browsers so they support two "modes": content mode, and application mode (or something like that) where the core functionality of the browser is rendering HTML content and, well, browsing. But a given page should be able to signal (through a meta tag or an HTTP header or something) "I'm an application" where it gets run as an application... which could still mean running in the browser as JS, or it could mean handing the thing off to a content handler to run the application outside of the browser. In my vision, the difference between "application mode" and "content mode" would be things like: in "application mode" all keybindings would pass through to the application, so you could - for example - use F1 for context sensitive help, instead of F1 triggering the browser's help menu. Also, app mode could allow things like altering the right-click context menu, while content mode might disable that. Etc. etc.
  - robocat 8y ago
    I would love browsers to split document-mode (think static content) and application mode (think single-page web app). When browsing documents, I don't want application cruft (I probably don't want JavaScript). I really don't want "application" features getting abused by adverts. For our SPA we have needs that are not related to documents (restricting the viewport zoom, fixed toolbars at top and bottom, preferably hide browser URL and toolbars). Heaps of modern browser functionality such as WebWorkers and notifications is only really relevant to web apps.
SamWhited 8y ago
I was perfectly fine with this right up until I clicked through to their support page, which pushes Pocket as an alternative. How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Get rid of RSS and link me to an extension when I open a feed, fine, but then stop shipping Pocket without giving me a way to uninstall it as well.
- ihuman 8y ago
  > How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Because Mozilla owns Pocket https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    This isn't about owning not owning pocket, its about paying for pocket development, while claiming that rss is too big of a burden to maintain.
    - dralley 8y ago
      Relative to usage? Because only 0.01% of Firefox users have ever used Live Bookmarks. I don't know how many use Pocket but I would be shocked it it wasn't far higher.
      - kibwen 8y ago
        As someone who has used Firefox almost exclusively since 2004 (ok, there was a year or two of Opera in there...) and as the sort of power user who continues to doggedly consume RSS to this day... yeah, I've never used Live Bookmarks. I remember seeing them in my bookmarks bar on fresh Firefox installs back in the day. The interface just wasn't amenable to my use patterns, and Google Reader was (these days I'm on Feedly).
burtonator 8y ago
I think I've come full circle on this... (I was one of the creators of RSS). My current company, Datastreamer: http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/ Provides social media data streams for companies and search engines wanting full torrents of web content. We deprecated RSS a LONG time ago, which was for me, like abandoning your baby. I think RSS is dead in many ways but it's also still around in a sense. Mostly because of Twitter and Facebook metadata. You can accomplish 90% of what you want with RSS just by parsing the metadata on an HTML page. Because we've added NLP and content extraction algorithms on top of the content we're able to re-construct feeds that are better than the original RSS. With another app I'm working on: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ I might actually use something similar to build in data feeds similar to a feed reader. But man.. I can't believe I'm thinking about building in a feed reader again :-P
- tgough 8y ago
  Is data streamer available for hobbyists? I saw the contact us page, but can’t tell if you provide any access for people who are just tinkering. Also, what is your pricing like? I understand you can’t give details, but are we talking a few hundred a month? A few thousand? Thanks!
  - burtonator 8y ago
    We provide discounts for startups and researchers. Definitely contact us. Pricing is based on query throughput but it's definitely affordable.
    - tgough 8y ago
      Thank you. I just submitted a query via your website.
- ip26 8y ago
  Thanks for your work on RSS. I can't stand the current news environment and have gone back to RSS for tuning into the news I care about. It's the only way I have to curate a list of sources- cutting popular sources I don't like and including super-niche sources I love. (I also like how data-lite it tends to be!) Shout-out to one of those niche sources, for example: https://www.newsdeeply.com/water https://www.newsdeeply.com/water
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
As much as I like RSS, one of the repeated pain points is that I'd like to actually read the content in my Feed Reader, but on many of the sites I pull from, the feeds only contain the article title and maybe half of the introductory sentence before dropping a link to the full article, which I then have to click and open in my browser. To my mind, it kinda defeats the purpose of having the feed, since I could just as easily scroll the front page of the site. Was it the intention of RSS from the outset that your feed would only provide a "preview" of the article, or was the hope that you would get the full body of the text?
- bpye 8y ago
  There definitely exist scrapers that work to get the full body. The reason for this is reading in a feed reader will never get your ad revenue or analytics, forcing your reader to the full page will.
  - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    Oh I definitely understand why sites do it this way. I simply wanted clarification on whether it was always the intention to do it that way, or if the content sites took the standard and crippled it in order to bring more ad revenue.
    - blihp 8y ago
      It could probably be argued that the standard is ambiguous as what content goes where is up to the creator of it. However, I think as a user it's fairly obvious that using it for clickbait and teaser headlines/articles rather than at least a complete thought is abusive. It's probably a non-trivial part of the reason its popularity with end users has waned in the much the same way spam polluted peoples email inboxes.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Yup. Standards from that age were written with friendly, cooperative actors in mind. The Internet is no longer a friendly place. Unfortunately, you can't just force people to not be greedy. (Clickbait itself is an example of that. You absolutely can get to the point in the title. But most media sources don't, because it's not their goal to inform you - their goal is to just exploit you for all they can.
onli 8y ago
I'm not okay with this. It is absolutely understandable that they want to remove the feed reader integrated into Firefox, that thing did not work well and I can understand that it was a lot of work. But the feed preview? If I understand correctly that's the proper display of the RSS/Atom feed itself when opened in Firefox, like https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg, which should be properly parsed in your browser. That's the absolute core a browser has to deliver: Rendering web content properly and not just to show the source code. If Firefox can't deliver that, what else does it want to deliver on? And removing this feature - like the missing feed detection in the UI - is what indeed can kills RSS, as it makes RSS inaccessible to users. Unlike the feed reader itself this can not be solved by webextensions.
- nebulous1 8y ago
  Doesn't parse it in Chrome
  - onli 8y ago
    Not sure about that, but I thought chrome is not parsing/rendering RSS at all. It's part of the problem.
    - nebulous1 8y ago
      Yeah, chrome doesn't do anything with RSS. I was responding to you saying that this is part of "the absolute core a browser has to deliver", but if the most popular browser around doesn't do it then I don't see how you can argue that this will be a major failure of Firefox Also I don't agree that this necessarily can't be done a webextension. For instance you can have add-ons like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/ so I assume the same would be true for RSS
      - onli 8y ago
        Oh, my point there was not that it is not possible. It should even be possible with an XLST stylesheet, though last I looked that was buggy. I wanted to express that you can't make RSS accessible to users if users have to install extensions to get a proper representation (and feedreader selection) when opening a feed. This stuff has to be built in to make RSS usable for the general public.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
This is anti-user.
Nadya 8y ago
Since this is the thread that took off for feature removal - I'll copy/paste a response I had in another thread that didn't foster more discussion. I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 - my entire workflow has slowly been gutted over the years. 1) With FF 41 I could no longer set my New Tab page to my Home Page without an add-on. As of Firefox 57 the add-on became buggy if you regularly and quickly try to { Ctrl+T -> Ctrl+L -> Begin typing URL } due to limitations with the Web Extension API. [0] 2) Lost Tab Groups as of FF 45 (the add-on isn't a full replacement of old functionality) 3) Lost many, many, many addons with FF 57 including a very specific tab management that an addon called FireGestures allowed for: using a context menu to navigate my tabs. 4) Lost Bookmark descriptions with FF 62, also lost the Developer Toolbar 5) Now losing Live Bookmarks with FF 64 I no longer recommend FF as the "power user" browser but as the "I dislike Google and want a good browser that isn't Chrome" browser. If you're a power user of some uncommonly used feature, expect it to be removed at some point. I'd love to see how Pocket usage is measured and the statistics of how many people use that trash that they have shoved down users' throats since FF 38. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 Enjoy all those security vulnerabilities you've just exposed yourself to.
  - Nadya 8y ago
    If someone manages to place malicious code onto any of the small number of websites I visit, I'm certain the first thing they'd be trying to do is exploit vulnerabilities in software that <0.001% of the site visitors would be using. The more vulnerabilities they attempt to exploit the faster they're going to be noticed so that's a risky gambit. Outside of vulnerabilities related to web browsing, software vulnerabilities rely on new, untrusted code running on my machine and in many cases the exploits rely on someone having physical access to my machine. The threat models just aren't all that relevant to me. The more realistic threat model is software being compromised and the auto-update feature pushing out malicious code to all of the users like what happened with the Transmission BitTorrent Client.
distilpost 8y ago
If your use case for RSS/Atom feeds is to read mainstream news, my startup https://distilpost.com https://distilpost.com can fill in very well. News aggregated from over 1k sources as well as from tweets and instagram posts and categorized both by region and subject matter.
ubersoldat2k7 8y ago
Great! Now I'll be able to open XML files without that dumb dialog.
xte 8y ago
Personally I get my feed via mail (RSS2Email) because - I can follow many site I like, instead of using an aggregator I do not own nor control; - I can read posts/articles/listen podcasts without crappy webui full of advertisements; - I can KEEP posts I'm interest in as long as I want, offline, indexed, tagged in my personal maildir taxonomy; I still have to find an alternative for that. Usenet of course was a far better way to follow news, ask questions etc, but unfortunately people do not know it anymore... Any modern "feed reader"/"podcatcher" I found, except elfeed are crappy, buggy, unuseful ridiculous apps that try to mimic aggregators instead of focusing on contents.
- daralthus 8y ago
  I am personally looking for the exact opposite. Read my newsletter subscriptions in my rss reader, so that I can choose the time I read them and keep email for important stuff.
  - xte 8y ago
    I do that, with emails. Simply thanks to notmuch-emacs my feeds does not arrive in my inbox but in a dedicated dir and I can access it from notmuch simply hitting 'r', outside notmuch, i.e. on mobile I can simply access that dir in my IMAP taxonomy with K9 as MUA. In the past I keep them separated but manage them, especially store&search with full-post locally saved in case it disappear from their origin it was hard or ineffective.
- a7776f88862 8y ago
  Recently started using RSS2email. Combined with a decent email client (ie not webmail crap like Gmail) it is awesome. The last time I was reading so many blogs and enjoying it was in the "classic" Opera browser circa 2010. Don't discount Usenet either. I know a couple of people who started using Usenet text groups again, and I am planning on joining them. I have come to the conclusion that it will be a better investment of time, because Usenet is archived and accessible. I regularly look up things from the 1990s and 1980s on Google Usenet search. Forums, websites, and blogs just disappear. Hopefully the same thing will not happen to Hacker News, but there is no guarantee.
tylershuster 8y ago
Does anyone know a good way to view RSS in Safari? I'm tired of getting "Safari cannot handle..." errors when debugging RSS. Even if I can just view the code, I'd live with that.
- aikah 8y ago
  If Safari does support XSLT, then it's up to the feed owner to create an XSL stylesheet and link it to the XML file in order to turn it into HTML, however it seems like very few developers even know what XSL is.
nahalz 8y ago
People have been bitching about Chrome too, and those things they were bitching about can also be disabled using flags. Turns out Google and the Mozilla Corporation are not so different after all!
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  Most of the issues I've had with Chrome can't be changed with flags. Do you have anything to back up that statement?
  - techntoke 8y ago
    Yes, a quick web search shows you: chrome://flags/ Also, there is Chromium: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      What. I was asking for evidence that the main things people complain about can be changed with flags. And your answer is "Flags exist."?
      - techntoke 8y ago
        You didn't provide any specifics, so you got a generic answer.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        A generic answer to the wrong question. I asked for evidence for the claim that list X matches list Y. You linked to list Y, which is both trivial to find and useless by itself.
        techntoke 8y ago
        > Most of the issues I've had with Chrome can't be changed with flags. Do you have anything to back up that statement? Until you specify what those features are, all one can do is show you where to change flags. Now you've resorted to using letters to tell me. Do not compute.
newman8r 8y ago
Here's a repo I set up with 23 US newspapers, OPML format so you can import it into your own RSS reader. https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml
- superkuh 8y ago
  Trading feed lists is handy. I'm in. Mine covers all the sciences/tech/etc plus a little politics/entertainment. Everything is sorted into categories. http://superkuh.com/feedlist.opml http://superkuh.com/feedlist.opml (93KB) As long as Firefox can still render feeds I don't care if they take out the bits to manage subscriptions to third party services. That seems like fluff to me. I think most people who use RSS use native readers or, at the least, some 'cloud' reader. Not too many people need their browser to handle it explicitly.
  - newman8r 8y ago
    That's a really solid list, thanks. Next time I do a weekend hackathon I want to create something that helps people like us share OPML files. All the RSS directories I've tried have been pretty subpar. The feedly directory is good, I just wish I could export the WHOLE directory as OPML (I wonder if someone's already done this)
Animats 8y ago
Now if they'd just remove core support for Pocket.
talonx 8y ago
I have always used RSS. After Google shutdown their Reader, I switched to InoReader. It's a tad slow but much better than alternatives (e.g. Feedly). The reason I prefer RSS is that I need to keep track of a lot of blogs and sites on topics of my interest, and with a feed reader I can "star" them, mark them as unread, search across them (yes!), and group them into sections so that I can process them more efficiently. Some of us just want more control without flashiness, in an organized but flexible way, in how we consume content, and RSS + a good reader is perfect for it.
- ibejoeb 8y ago
  I really can't trust hosted readers anymore. Just seems to be too expensive to operate. I switched to Digg Reader after Google Reader shut. Not sure RSS has much of a future.
unicornporn 8y ago
For me, RSS is by far the best way to access web content. I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it. One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of. If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/). [1] https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/ [2] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- Dotnaught 8y ago
  I wrote vulture-feeds specifically for headline scanning via RSS. I don't want to read everything. https://github.com/Dotnaught/vulture-feeds https://github.com/Dotnaught/vulture-feeds
meesles 8y ago
I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today. Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with advertising, tracking, etc. Most modern content sites would not support that sentiment. Personally, I think RSS was one of the crowning achievements of the web. So much so that I attempted to make a little tool to 'create' RSS feeds out of websites that I want to track: http://diyrss.info/u/meesles http://diyrss.info/u/meesles (the view for a logged-in user shows when new content is available to read) But again, this isn't sustainable. Any content site depending on revenue would rather users visit their site every 2 hours for content updates than use a third party like Feedly or DIYRSS. I think the solution lies in a fundamentally different revenue model for content, at least for smaller providers.
- baldfat 8y ago
  > I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today. Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with advertising, tracking, etc. How so? I think RSS increases advertising and tracking in actual usage of rss readers. When I want to read the article I actually have to open the webpage. The RSS feed normally gives you a headline and if your lucky the first paragraph. So I am going directly to the source when I use RSS. When I use Google News or Facebook I am going to a lot fewer websites.
  - meesles 8y ago
    Because I think the sites would rather you rack up page views browsing for the content you want to read as well. They'd rather you scroll through their index page than one curated and cleaned of ads/trackers. I do agree that the actual content parsers like FB and Google are even more contrarian to what these sites want.
    - baldfat 8y ago
      I'm just saying that the websites are short sighted when they attacked RSS.
putlake 8y ago
This is truly sad because RSS clearly fulfills a need that Facebook/Twitter feeds never will. Just last month I launched a bipartisan political news aggregator to force us out of our filter bubbles[1]. The only way I was able to do that was by consuming the politics RSS feeds for both right-leaning and left-leaning news websites. Without RSS, it's much harder to build an aggregator like this. 1. https://smashthebubble.com/ https://smashthebubble.com/
sixhobbits 8y ago
interesting - I just got a notification from Dropbox "On Dec 14, 2018, we're saying goodbye to the events RSS feed. We think some of your team members may have used this feed. We're focused on building better tools for viewing and monitoring activity, for admins and users alike. Here are some other ways you can see what's happening in Dropbox" I don't see any relation, but could any factor have influenced the timing of these announcements? Or is it just a coincidence that two large co's drop RSS within hours of each other.
sys_64738 8y ago
When Google sunset Reader I was lost as that's the one and only way I access content on the Internet. I found my solution in inoreader.com which is close enough that I don't miss it. I can even login via Google SSO. But it costs some $$$ but it's a great service and worth it IMO. FWIW, I only want to see RSS feeds in a browser from any device I have and not have to own the RSS backend myself, so my method works for me.
qwerty456127 8y ago
It sounds like a sad thing as RSS/Atom is a great thing that I would love to see regaining its popularity but in fact "RSS/Atom support" in browsers always seemed useless to me. Using the default browser facilities to read feeds felt like using Notepad to write code. There always are much better feed readers available.
- XJOKOLAT 8y ago
  DUMBASSSSSS
erikrothoff 8y ago
I actually built my own extension for Chrome back in the day when I wanted to switch from Firefox to Chrome. It was modeled after Firefox Live Bookmarks. We've now come full circle and implemented an addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/
djsumdog 8y ago
I totally forgot about the built in RSS support. I've been using a self hosted tt-rss instance for a few months and really like it.
danShumway 8y ago
I'm conflicted. Moving RSS/Atom into webextensions is probably the right decision if you want a small, focused browser that does what it does well and that allows the community to innovate on top of it. And I want that. So I should be happy, but Firefox overall doesn't seem to necessarily be moving in that direction. Like, I still don't really get why we have Pocket integration. So now I don't know. It's a good decision that's maybe being made for the wrong reasons, and that may have bad side effects.
evolve2k 8y ago
Why are these announcements on such a strange domain, wouldn’t an official domain be more appropriate for this type of news? Looks like a random personal blog site, I looked around first but currently still have no idea what this site is otherwise for.
- severine 8y ago
  This is the announcement that popped after updating Nightly: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migration?as=u&utm_source=inproduct https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migratio... I submitted it to HN right away, but it didn't get traction.
Semiapies 8y ago
They're taking out RSS? Hmph. Well, this is why I support Fire—...Oh, shit.
norswap 8y ago
What a load of bullshit. Sure it's extra code, but browsers are ginormous anyway. Removing Live Bookmarks is fine. But why get rid of the RSS auto-detection? It's a good advertisement for an immensely useful open technology. Also... RSS is out and Pocket is in? Ironic. I thought Mozilla was the one fighting for the open web? Well go fuck yourself Mozilla - that's what I'm feeling right now.
- orblivion 8y ago
  Keep in mind that running an open source company is squaring a circle. The money has to come from somewhere. One corner or other has to be cut. I'm not saying we shouldn't push back, but we should understand the position they're in. They do pretty damn well all considered, and they're one of the few large organizations holding the front.
  - OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
    lol holding the front? they just removed rss.
futurix 8y ago
I much prefer a combo of Feedly and Reeder to any half-arsed RSS support built into the browsers.
zmix 8y ago
Why use RSS at all, if you can use ATOM?
- handelaar 8y ago
  The format created out of petty spite against Winer that nobody's ever used? Died on its arse when presented with millions of podcast users, didn't it?
zmix 8y ago
I feel, this may be more about Mozilla trying to get rid of XML at all. Because, why would something simple as RSS be a burden to maintain? The code has been written (!), the format well understood, the years gone should have ironed out the bugs, so what could be the problem? The only difficult thing to maintain may be an XML parser, but that is also there since the Netscape days and, for RSS, you don't need current XML technologies (XPath 2+), you are fine with XPath1.
Endy 8y ago
With Firefox removing RSS, I think that's the final nail in the coffin for it. There is nothing left of what Firefox was, it's now just a hollow shell and a name that means nothing.
seomint 8y ago
I really want to be outraged by this (you know Aaron Swartz and all that) but should I be?
tannhaeuser 8y ago
And this is why I'm so strongly against adding any more features to browsers such as WASM and new JavaScript language features and APIs: because browsers are already extremely complex programs that can't easily be created from scratch if FF decides to push their users around. I just hope all those armchair web devs who are only looking at their favourite programming language to become supported in browsers via WASM would consider how much they contribute to the death of the web by too many features. Those parties already in the game - browser vendors and self-acclaimed standard bodies - don't have an incentive to simplify the web stack, and will never be able to step back and say "the web is done" after 25 years of attempting to shoehorn a document viewer into an application platform.
yrro 8y ago
Cd
abrowne 8y ago
I heavily use both Firefox and RSS — with FeedHQ — but I've never used any of Firefox's RSS features (except the feed preview, but only incidentally, and it's nothing I'll miss.)
nephrite 8y ago
I like RSS very much and use it everywhere I can, but for me the live bookmark feature in Firefox kinda sucked. I use other readers like e.g. Thunderbird.
rmbeard 8y ago
A browser based feed reader is a better solution than browser tabs. A pity to lose RSS for lack of imaginative use.

634 points by arayh 8y ago

clircle 8y ago

This is fine IMO. Thunderbird has better RSS support.

Symbiote 8y ago
Indeed, but the preview functionality was very useful for deciding whether to add a particular feed. Couldn't an XSLT + XSL stylesheet achive most of what the preview function would continue to be useful for?
- blablabla123 8y ago
  True ;) https://github.com/concerto/concerto-simple-rss/wiki/Transforming-RSS-with-XSLT https://github.com/concerto/concerto-simple-rss/wiki/Transfo... Probably it suffices to use regular CSS after having it converted to XHTML...
- cubano 8y ago
  You lost me at "...XSLT + XSL stylesheet..." I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with. On top of that, I still can't figure out exactly what problem its trying to solve, unless it purpose is job security to overpaid corporate contractors. We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just leave everything else be.
  - aikah 8y ago
    > I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with. It's because XSL is (recursive) functional programming, and most developers fight that fact trying to write imperative XSL. > We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just leave everything else be. Except you're not going to anything with JSON without writing Javascript code, since neither HTML or CSS do understand JSON. XSL works without a single line of Javasript and it is still supported by most browsers.
newscracker 8y ago
Let’s hope Thunderbird doesn’t lose feed reading/subscriptions soon. It does use large parts of Firefox code, and is already having issues in the post XUL world of Firefox.
blablabla123 8y ago
On macOS the font in the overview list is very small, at least on my laptop. As soon as I spot a better tool, I switch.

nachtigall 8y ago

For everyone looking for an alternative, Brief is an excellent add-on and I've been using it for the last 2 years: AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/ GitHub: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief https://github.com/brief-rss/brief It also includes a `Page action` so that an RSS icon is shown in the address bar on sites that support RSS/Atom. Great for discovery. Edit: Really strange, that `Brief` is missing in the curated list of readers that mozilla is linking to from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement... as alternative: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla/refined-reading/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla... (This looks like a really poor list) I've seen `Brief` recommended all the time by users. I don't really mind that Firefox removes its RSS support: It was missing many features anyway and had a really poor UX.

yaantc 8y ago
You can check Feedbro as an alternative to Brief: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader I was a long time user of Brief but moved away during the transition to webextensions. Although Brief worked there were some performance issues at the time (maybe solved now?). Both provide a similar user experience, and are the two best RSS readers I used so far.
- skosch 8y ago
  Feedbro isn't open source, unfortunately. Brief is atrocious-looking out of the box, but you can enter your own CSS to override the styling. I've been pretty happy with it for the last few years.
ePierre 8y ago
Thanks for pointing this out! I'm currently using a feed reader installed on my web server so that I can access and sync my feeds between all my devices (home computer, work computer and smartphone). I use Firefox on all of my devices. Do you know if there is a way to sync the Brief database on different devices to keep them in sync?

unstuckdev 8y ago

I already searched feeds up in my feed reader, but only because the existing Firefox feature was poorly-integrated. I never could figure out how to have it redirect feeds to a reader. I wanted something like the way you can add search engines, but for third-party RSS readers. The feature as it was didn't work very well, and they obviously weren't going to improve it. So maybe it's for the best that they remove it.

mjw1007 8y ago
I think the feed reader had to register itself, using registerHandler with mimetype application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed . See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/2/Adding_feed_readers_to_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

mjw1007 8y ago

They say they're removing three things: - the built-in feed preview feature - the "live bookmarks" support - the subscription UI They give justifications for removing the first two, but not the third. Assuming by "subscription UI" they mean the support for following a link to an RSS feed and being given the option to send the URL to my preferred online feed reader, I think that's a great shame. Making it worse, that article says "that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons", with a link to what they say is a curated collection of readers, but none of the add-ons in that collection seem to replace the old subscription UI.

cabaalis 8y ago
One of the justifications from the article: > feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions. I'm curious the source of this data, seeing as I've switched to Firefox due to privacy concerns.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  It's a silly justification anyway, as far as "feed previews" go: you preview a feed when you're thinking of subscribing to it, which isn't expected to be an everyday sort of action. I hope they wouldn't consider removing the option to select which application to use to open a particular file type, or to install an add-on, based on the percentage of sessions which use it.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Presumably it is from the users who didn't turn off usage data reporting.
- yorwba 8y ago
  Telemetry: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report Edit: I just found out that you can look at the collected data at about:telemetry
  - jasonjayr 8y ago

ccnafr 8y ago

They announced it months ago, in July: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-support-for-built-in-feed-reader-from-firefox/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-re... Here's the direct link to the internal doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_NrJXupcMilTPFFVpmnI/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_...

bachmeier 8y ago
> They announced it months ago And what percentage of Firefox users would pay attention to an announcement like that? Maybe this is the right decision, but they need to be careful.
mjw1007 8y ago
That internal doc is rather close to the article linked here, though I notice this piece of the rationale didn't make it into the public version: « Additionally, we are working on various initiatives that operate in the same area of focus as RSS/Atom feed support, like Pocket [...] »

hkai 8y ago

That's plainly sad. Next thing is websites will start removing rss, which means it will be harder for me to scrape them.

MrEfficiency 8y ago
I'm not sure any web dev is going to change their format because Firefox removed a feature. I've noticed my RSS content is scraped which makes gives me additional users. Removing RSS would hurt my website.
sp332 8y ago
Hopefully RSS users will move to readers with better UIs, increasing their visibility and attracting more people to using RSS.

mooreds 8y ago

No one likes to see features removed from something. But this seems really reasonable given alternatives and current usage. Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products. Another favorite quote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision." I'm betting this hurt (though a brief search through the FF mailing lists didn't turn up anything), but it seems like a good strategic decision.

bachmeier 8y ago
"Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products." That doesn't apply in this case. Saying no would have meant they never added it to Firefox. They said yes and now they're removing it. I'm not sure who said it, but there's a saying along the lines of "If you force users to change, they go shopping." Keep in mind that the definition of "great product" depends on the person. For the average user, a product that does what you want and keeps doing it is a great product, and anything else sucks.
- ams6110 8y ago
  They also said that the features are used by less than 0.01% of users. I assume this is based on their own telemetry. So they're really not forcing very many users to change at all.
  - mjw1007 8y ago
    They said 0.01% of sessions. Feed preview isn't something you expect to use every session.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    No, they're just following the lure of analytics, to optimize things that should just be left alone.
gmjoe 8y ago

thatsaguy 8y ago

RSS support in FF was always poor, but that was often enough to preview a subscription. It didn't need to be more complicated than that. On the other hand, or hay, Firefox Screenshots!! Sooo useful. Pocket? It doesn't get more federated than that! Or the dozen of DOM APIs added every year, which are probably much more complicated to maintain than a simple RSS preview feature. I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed.

mindcrime 8y ago
I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed. I've hated it for a while, especially as browsers move more and more away from "browsing" and become more and more of a half-ass "universal application runtime" combined with "something kinda like an X-server but not really". I kinda think we need to split browsers so they support two "modes": content mode, and application mode (or something like that) where the core functionality of the browser is rendering HTML content and, well, browsing. But a given page should be able to signal (through a meta tag or an HTTP header or something) "I'm an application" where it gets run as an application... which could still mean running in the browser as JS, or it could mean handing the thing off to a content handler to run the application outside of the browser. In my vision, the difference between "application mode" and "content mode" would be things like: in "application mode" all keybindings would pass through to the application, so you could - for example - use F1 for context sensitive help, instead of F1 triggering the browser's help menu. Also, app mode could allow things like altering the right-click context menu, while content mode might disable that. Etc. etc.
- robocat 8y ago
  I would love browsers to split document-mode (think static content) and application mode (think single-page web app). When browsing documents, I don't want application cruft (I probably don't want JavaScript). I really don't want "application" features getting abused by adverts. For our SPA we have needs that are not related to documents (restricting the viewport zoom, fixed toolbars at top and bottom, preferably hide browser URL and toolbars). Heaps of modern browser functionality such as WebWorkers and notifications is only really relevant to web apps.

SamWhited 8y ago

I was perfectly fine with this right up until I clicked through to their support page, which pushes Pocket as an alternative. How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Get rid of RSS and link me to an extension when I open a feed, fine, but then stop shipping Pocket without giving me a way to uninstall it as well.

ihuman 8y ago
> How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Because Mozilla owns Pocket https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  This isn't about owning not owning pocket, its about paying for pocket development, while claiming that rss is too big of a burden to maintain.
  - dralley 8y ago
    Relative to usage? Because only 0.01% of Firefox users have ever used Live Bookmarks. I don't know how many use Pocket but I would be shocked it it wasn't far higher.
    - kibwen 8y ago
      As someone who has used Firefox almost exclusively since 2004 (ok, there was a year or two of Opera in there...) and as the sort of power user who continues to doggedly consume RSS to this day... yeah, I've never used Live Bookmarks. I remember seeing them in my bookmarks bar on fresh Firefox installs back in the day. The interface just wasn't amenable to my use patterns, and Google Reader was (these days I'm on Feedly).

burtonator 8y ago

I think I've come full circle on this... (I was one of the creators of RSS). My current company, Datastreamer: http://www.datastreamer.io/ http://www.datastreamer.io/ Provides social media data streams for companies and search engines wanting full torrents of web content. We deprecated RSS a LONG time ago, which was for me, like abandoning your baby. I think RSS is dead in many ways but it's also still around in a sense. Mostly because of Twitter and Facebook metadata. You can accomplish 90% of what you want with RSS just by parsing the metadata on an HTML page. Because we've added NLP and content extraction algorithms on top of the content we're able to re-construct feeds that are better than the original RSS. With another app I'm working on: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ I might actually use something similar to build in data feeds similar to a feed reader. But man.. I can't believe I'm thinking about building in a feed reader again :-P

tgough 8y ago
Is data streamer available for hobbyists? I saw the contact us page, but can’t tell if you provide any access for people who are just tinkering. Also, what is your pricing like? I understand you can’t give details, but are we talking a few hundred a month? A few thousand? Thanks!
- burtonator 8y ago
  We provide discounts for startups and researchers. Definitely contact us. Pricing is based on query throughput but it's definitely affordable.
  - tgough 8y ago
    Thank you. I just submitted a query via your website.
ip26 8y ago
Thanks for your work on RSS. I can't stand the current news environment and have gone back to RSS for tuning into the news I care about. It's the only way I have to curate a list of sources- cutting popular sources I don't like and including super-niche sources I love. (I also like how data-lite it tends to be!) Shout-out to one of those niche sources, for example: https://www.newsdeeply.com/water https://www.newsdeeply.com/water

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

As much as I like RSS, one of the repeated pain points is that I'd like to actually read the content in my Feed Reader, but on many of the sites I pull from, the feeds only contain the article title and maybe half of the introductory sentence before dropping a link to the full article, which I then have to click and open in my browser. To my mind, it kinda defeats the purpose of having the feed, since I could just as easily scroll the front page of the site. Was it the intention of RSS from the outset that your feed would only provide a "preview" of the article, or was the hope that you would get the full body of the text?

bpye 8y ago
There definitely exist scrapers that work to get the full body. The reason for this is reading in a feed reader will never get your ad revenue or analytics, forcing your reader to the full page will.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Oh I definitely understand why sites do it this way. I simply wanted clarification on whether it was always the intention to do it that way, or if the content sites took the standard and crippled it in order to bring more ad revenue.
  - blihp 8y ago
    It could probably be argued that the standard is ambiguous as what content goes where is up to the creator of it. However, I think as a user it's fairly obvious that using it for clickbait and teaser headlines/articles rather than at least a complete thought is abusive. It's probably a non-trivial part of the reason its popularity with end users has waned in the much the same way spam polluted peoples email inboxes.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Yup. Standards from that age were written with friendly, cooperative actors in mind. The Internet is no longer a friendly place. Unfortunately, you can't just force people to not be greedy. (Clickbait itself is an example of that. You absolutely can get to the point in the title. But most media sources don't, because it's not their goal to inform you - their goal is to just exploit you for all they can.

onli 8y ago

I'm not okay with this. It is absolutely understandable that they want to remove the feed reader integrated into Firefox, that thing did not work well and I can understand that it was a lot of work. But the feed preview? If I understand correctly that's the proper display of the RSS/Atom feed itself when opened in Firefox, like https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg, which should be properly parsed in your browser. That's the absolute core a browser has to deliver: Rendering web content properly and not just to show the source code. If Firefox can't deliver that, what else does it want to deliver on? And removing this feature - like the missing feed detection in the UI - is what indeed can kills RSS, as it makes RSS inaccessible to users. Unlike the feed reader itself this can not be solved by webextensions.

nebulous1 8y ago
Doesn't parse it in Chrome
- onli 8y ago
  Not sure about that, but I thought chrome is not parsing/rendering RSS at all. It's part of the problem.
  - nebulous1 8y ago
    Yeah, chrome doesn't do anything with RSS. I was responding to you saying that this is part of "the absolute core a browser has to deliver", but if the most popular browser around doesn't do it then I don't see how you can argue that this will be a major failure of Firefox Also I don't agree that this necessarily can't be done a webextension. For instance you can have add-ons like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/ so I assume the same would be true for RSS
    - onli 8y ago
      Oh, my point there was not that it is not possible. It should even be possible with an XLST stylesheet, though last I looked that was buggy. I wanted to express that you can't make RSS accessible to users if users have to install extensions to get a proper representation (and feedreader selection) when opening a feed. This stuff has to be built in to make RSS usable for the general public.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

This is anti-user.

Nadya 8y ago

Since this is the thread that took off for feature removal - I'll copy/paste a response I had in another thread that didn't foster more discussion. I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 - my entire workflow has slowly been gutted over the years. 1) With FF 41 I could no longer set my New Tab page to my Home Page without an add-on. As of Firefox 57 the add-on became buggy if you regularly and quickly try to { Ctrl+T -> Ctrl+L -> Begin typing URL } due to limitations with the Web Extension API. [0] 2) Lost Tab Groups as of FF 45 (the add-on isn't a full replacement of old functionality) 3) Lost many, many, many addons with FF 57 including a very specific tab management that an addon called FireGestures allowed for: using a context menu to navigate my tabs. 4) Lost Bookmark descriptions with FF 62, also lost the Developer Toolbar 5) Now losing Live Bookmarks with FF 64 I no longer recommend FF as the "power user" browser but as the "I dislike Google and want a good browser that isn't Chrome" browser. If you're a power user of some uncommonly used feature, expect it to be removed at some point. I'd love to see how Pocket usage is measured and the statistics of how many people use that trash that they have shoved down users' throats since FF 38. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...

craftyguy 8y ago
> I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 Enjoy all those security vulnerabilities you've just exposed yourself to.
- Nadya 8y ago
  If someone manages to place malicious code onto any of the small number of websites I visit, I'm certain the first thing they'd be trying to do is exploit vulnerabilities in software that <0.001% of the site visitors would be using. The more vulnerabilities they attempt to exploit the faster they're going to be noticed so that's a risky gambit. Outside of vulnerabilities related to web browsing, software vulnerabilities rely on new, untrusted code running on my machine and in many cases the exploits rely on someone having physical access to my machine. The threat models just aren't all that relevant to me. The more realistic threat model is software being compromised and the auto-update feature pushing out malicious code to all of the users like what happened with the Transmission BitTorrent Client.

distilpost 8y ago

If your use case for RSS/Atom feeds is to read mainstream news, my startup https://distilpost.com https://distilpost.com can fill in very well. News aggregated from over 1k sources as well as from tweets and instagram posts and categorized both by region and subject matter.

ubersoldat2k7 8y ago

Great! Now I'll be able to open XML files without that dumb dialog.

xte 8y ago

Personally I get my feed via mail (RSS2Email) because - I can follow many site I like, instead of using an aggregator I do not own nor control; - I can read posts/articles/listen podcasts without crappy webui full of advertisements; - I can KEEP posts I'm interest in as long as I want, offline, indexed, tagged in my personal maildir taxonomy; I still have to find an alternative for that. Usenet of course was a far better way to follow news, ask questions etc, but unfortunately people do not know it anymore... Any modern "feed reader"/"podcatcher" I found, except elfeed are crappy, buggy, unuseful ridiculous apps that try to mimic aggregators instead of focusing on contents.

daralthus 8y ago
I am personally looking for the exact opposite. Read my newsletter subscriptions in my rss reader, so that I can choose the time I read them and keep email for important stuff.
- xte 8y ago
  I do that, with emails. Simply thanks to notmuch-emacs my feeds does not arrive in my inbox but in a dedicated dir and I can access it from notmuch simply hitting 'r', outside notmuch, i.e. on mobile I can simply access that dir in my IMAP taxonomy with K9 as MUA. In the past I keep them separated but manage them, especially store&search with full-post locally saved in case it disappear from their origin it was hard or ineffective.
a7776f88862 8y ago
Recently started using RSS2email. Combined with a decent email client (ie not webmail crap like Gmail) it is awesome. The last time I was reading so many blogs and enjoying it was in the "classic" Opera browser circa 2010. Don't discount Usenet either. I know a couple of people who started using Usenet text groups again, and I am planning on joining them. I have come to the conclusion that it will be a better investment of time, because Usenet is archived and accessible. I regularly look up things from the 1990s and 1980s on Google Usenet search. Forums, websites, and blogs just disappear. Hopefully the same thing will not happen to Hacker News, but there is no guarantee.

tylershuster 8y ago

Does anyone know a good way to view RSS in Safari? I'm tired of getting "Safari cannot handle..." errors when debugging RSS. Even if I can just view the code, I'd live with that.

aikah 8y ago
If Safari does support XSLT, then it's up to the feed owner to create an XSL stylesheet and link it to the XML file in order to turn it into HTML, however it seems like very few developers even know what XSL is.

nahalz 8y ago

People have been bitching about Chrome too, and those things they were bitching about can also be disabled using flags. Turns out Google and the Mozilla Corporation are not so different after all!

Dylan16807 8y ago
Most of the issues I've had with Chrome can't be changed with flags. Do you have anything to back up that statement?
- techntoke 8y ago
  Yes, a quick web search shows you: chrome://flags/ Also, there is Chromium: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    What. I was asking for evidence that the main things people complain about can be changed with flags. And your answer is "Flags exist."?
    - techntoke 8y ago
      You didn't provide any specifics, so you got a generic answer.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        A generic answer to the wrong question. I asked for evidence for the claim that list X matches list Y. You linked to list Y, which is both trivial to find and useless by itself.
        techntoke 8y ago
        > Most of the issues I've had with Chrome can't be changed with flags. Do you have anything to back up that statement? Until you specify what those features are, all one can do is show you where to change flags. Now you've resorted to using letters to tell me. Do not compute.

newman8r 8y ago

Here's a repo I set up with 23 US newspapers, OPML format so you can import it into your own RSS reader. https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml

superkuh 8y ago
Trading feed lists is handy. I'm in. Mine covers all the sciences/tech/etc plus a little politics/entertainment. Everything is sorted into categories. http://superkuh.com/feedlist.opml http://superkuh.com/feedlist.opml (93KB) As long as Firefox can still render feeds I don't care if they take out the bits to manage subscriptions to third party services. That seems like fluff to me. I think most people who use RSS use native readers or, at the least, some 'cloud' reader. Not too many people need their browser to handle it explicitly.
- newman8r 8y ago
  That's a really solid list, thanks. Next time I do a weekend hackathon I want to create something that helps people like us share OPML files. All the RSS directories I've tried have been pretty subpar. The feedly directory is good, I just wish I could export the WHOLE directory as OPML (I wonder if someone's already done this)

Animats 8y ago

Now if they'd just remove core support for Pocket.

talonx 8y ago

I have always used RSS. After Google shutdown their Reader, I switched to InoReader. It's a tad slow but much better than alternatives (e.g. Feedly). The reason I prefer RSS is that I need to keep track of a lot of blogs and sites on topics of my interest, and with a feed reader I can "star" them, mark them as unread, search across them (yes!), and group them into sections so that I can process them more efficiently. Some of us just want more control without flashiness, in an organized but flexible way, in how we consume content, and RSS + a good reader is perfect for it.

ibejoeb 8y ago
I really can't trust hosted readers anymore. Just seems to be too expensive to operate. I switched to Digg Reader after Google Reader shut. Not sure RSS has much of a future.

unicornporn 8y ago

For me, RSS is by far the best way to access web content. I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it. One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of. If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/). [1] https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/ [2] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

Dotnaught 8y ago
I wrote vulture-feeds specifically for headline scanning via RSS. I don't want to read everything. https://github.com/Dotnaught/vulture-feeds https://github.com/Dotnaught/vulture-feeds

meesles 8y ago

I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today. Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with advertising, tracking, etc. Most modern content sites would not support that sentiment. Personally, I think RSS was one of the crowning achievements of the web. So much so that I attempted to make a little tool to 'create' RSS feeds out of websites that I want to track: http://diyrss.info/u/meesles http://diyrss.info/u/meesles (the view for a logged-in user shows when new content is available to read) But again, this isn't sustainable. Any content site depending on revenue would rather users visit their site every 2 hours for content updates than use a third party like Feedly or DIYRSS. I think the solution lies in a fundamentally different revenue model for content, at least for smaller providers.

baldfat 8y ago
> I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today. Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with advertising, tracking, etc. How so? I think RSS increases advertising and tracking in actual usage of rss readers. When I want to read the article I actually have to open the webpage. The RSS feed normally gives you a headline and if your lucky the first paragraph. So I am going directly to the source when I use RSS. When I use Google News or Facebook I am going to a lot fewer websites.
- meesles 8y ago
  Because I think the sites would rather you rack up page views browsing for the content you want to read as well. They'd rather you scroll through their index page than one curated and cleaned of ads/trackers. I do agree that the actual content parsers like FB and Google are even more contrarian to what these sites want.
  - baldfat 8y ago
    I'm just saying that the websites are short sighted when they attacked RSS.

putlake 8y ago

This is truly sad because RSS clearly fulfills a need that Facebook/Twitter feeds never will. Just last month I launched a bipartisan political news aggregator to force us out of our filter bubbles[1]. The only way I was able to do that was by consuming the politics RSS feeds for both right-leaning and left-leaning news websites. Without RSS, it's much harder to build an aggregator like this. 1. https://smashthebubble.com/ https://smashthebubble.com/

sixhobbits 8y ago

interesting - I just got a notification from Dropbox "On Dec 14, 2018, we're saying goodbye to the events RSS feed. We think some of your team members may have used this feed. We're focused on building better tools for viewing and monitoring activity, for admins and users alike. Here are some other ways you can see what's happening in Dropbox" I don't see any relation, but could any factor have influenced the timing of these announcements? Or is it just a coincidence that two large co's drop RSS within hours of each other.

sys_64738 8y ago

When Google sunset Reader I was lost as that's the one and only way I access content on the Internet. I found my solution in inoreader.com which is close enough that I don't miss it. I can even login via Google SSO. But it costs some $$$ but it's a great service and worth it IMO. FWIW, I only want to see RSS feeds in a browser from any device I have and not have to own the RSS backend myself, so my method works for me.

qwerty456127 8y ago

It sounds like a sad thing as RSS/Atom is a great thing that I would love to see regaining its popularity but in fact "RSS/Atom support" in browsers always seemed useless to me. Using the default browser facilities to read feeds felt like using Notepad to write code. There always are much better feed readers available.

XJOKOLAT 8y ago
DUMBASSSSSS

erikrothoff 8y ago

I actually built my own extension for Chrome back in the day when I wanted to switch from Firefox to Chrome. It was modeled after Firefox Live Bookmarks. We've now come full circle and implemented an addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/

djsumdog 8y ago

I totally forgot about the built in RSS support. I've been using a self hosted tt-rss instance for a few months and really like it.

danShumway 8y ago

I'm conflicted. Moving RSS/Atom into webextensions is probably the right decision if you want a small, focused browser that does what it does well and that allows the community to innovate on top of it. And I want that. So I should be happy, but Firefox overall doesn't seem to necessarily be moving in that direction. Like, I still don't really get why we have Pocket integration. So now I don't know. It's a good decision that's maybe being made for the wrong reasons, and that may have bad side effects.

evolve2k 8y ago

Why are these announcements on such a strange domain, wouldn’t an official domain be more appropriate for this type of news? Looks like a random personal blog site, I looked around first but currently still have no idea what this site is otherwise for.

severine 8y ago
This is the announcement that popped after updating Nightly: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migration?as=u&utm_source=inproduct https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migratio... I submitted it to HN right away, but it didn't get traction.

Semiapies 8y ago

They're taking out RSS? Hmph. Well, this is why I support Fire—...Oh, shit.

norswap 8y ago

What a load of bullshit. Sure it's extra code, but browsers are ginormous anyway. Removing Live Bookmarks is fine. But why get rid of the RSS auto-detection? It's a good advertisement for an immensely useful open technology. Also... RSS is out and Pocket is in? Ironic. I thought Mozilla was the one fighting for the open web? Well go fuck yourself Mozilla - that's what I'm feeling right now.

orblivion 8y ago
Keep in mind that running an open source company is squaring a circle. The money has to come from somewhere. One corner or other has to be cut. I'm not saying we shouldn't push back, but we should understand the position they're in. They do pretty damn well all considered, and they're one of the few large organizations holding the front.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
  lol holding the front? they just removed rss.

futurix 8y ago

I much prefer a combo of Feedly and Reeder to any half-arsed RSS support built into the browsers.

zmix 8y ago

Why use RSS at all, if you can use ATOM?

handelaar 8y ago
The format created out of petty spite against Winer that nobody's ever used? Died on its arse when presented with millions of podcast users, didn't it?

zmix 8y ago

I feel, this may be more about Mozilla trying to get rid of XML at all. Because, why would something simple as RSS be a burden to maintain? The code has been written (!), the format well understood, the years gone should have ironed out the bugs, so what could be the problem? The only difficult thing to maintain may be an XML parser, but that is also there since the Netscape days and, for RSS, you don't need current XML technologies (XPath 2+), you are fine with XPath1.

Endy 8y ago

With Firefox removing RSS, I think that's the final nail in the coffin for it. There is nothing left of what Firefox was, it's now just a hollow shell and a name that means nothing.

seomint 8y ago

I really want to be outraged by this (you know Aaron Swartz and all that) but should I be?

tannhaeuser 8y ago

And this is why I'm so strongly against adding any more features to browsers such as WASM and new JavaScript language features and APIs: because browsers are already extremely complex programs that can't easily be created from scratch if FF decides to push their users around. I just hope all those armchair web devs who are only looking at their favourite programming language to become supported in browsers via WASM would consider how much they contribute to the death of the web by too many features. Those parties already in the game - browser vendors and self-acclaimed standard bodies - don't have an incentive to simplify the web stack, and will never be able to step back and say "the web is done" after 25 years of attempting to shoehorn a document viewer into an application platform.

yrro 8y ago

abrowne 8y ago

I heavily use both Firefox and RSS — with FeedHQ — but I've never used any of Firefox's RSS features (except the feed preview, but only incidentally, and it's nothing I'll miss.)

nephrite 8y ago

I like RSS very much and use it everywhere I can, but for me the live bookmark feature in Firefox kinda sucked. I use other readers like e.g. Thunderbird.

rmbeard 8y ago

A browser based feed reader is a better solution than browser tabs. A pity to lose RSS for lack of imaginative use.