6 ms·

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS shou

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content. I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051

thelazydogsback 6y ago
Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.
- apostacy 6y ago
  That is pretty cool. But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all. RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing. Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
  - thelazydogsback 6y ago
    Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.
    - apostacy 6y ago
      I appreciate you sharing. I didn't mean to shoot you down or anything.
      - thelazydogsback 6y ago
        No problem -- I didn't take it that way at all!
  - synchrone 6y ago
    as far as i can see, RSSHub does exactly that, and supports as many as 536 scraped sources (of varying caliber) at https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes. It's not an outlandish amount of work, if lots of people chip in with their favorite source.
    - apostacy 6y ago
      I see what you are saying, but I still think it is a far cry from having content providers simply providing the feeds themselves. In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine generating them, any substitute for the content creator providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed captions from the audio, but I still don't think we should let television producers off the hook for providing captions. RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate RSS. I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a "standard", and because they felt that it was popular enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads, and their control of the presentation. And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it. And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the web.
  - jjordan 6y ago
    Maybe what we need is an accessibility equivalent to the SSL Server Test. Input your domain and it gives you a letter grade on how accessible your site is. RSS access should be heavily weighted, of course.
    - hopesthoughts 6y ago
      When I look for an RSS feed, it's usually to see if it's updating, not because of any accessibility concerns. A lot of times, I'll find broken feeds. However, if a site is really giving me trouble with navigation, I'll rely on the RSS feed for reading purposes.
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  I used to be a big fan of RSS feeds but with their demise I started using Feedly. It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
  - danielrm26 6y ago
    Feedly is an RSS reader. It’s not one or the other.
    - Fiveplus 6y ago
      I should've been clearer above, I meant the google RSS reader [feeds]. Either way, your point stands to anyone wondering about the identity of feedly :)
sergiotapia 6y ago
I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897. I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
  - apostacy 6y ago
    > The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897. Then that is a great justification for improving it then. Or at least bundling an RSS add-on. Mozilla felt that bundling Pocket was ok, but not one of the many great RSS add-ons? > I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. The truth is, they did not see it as an essential part of the web, worth implementing. If you look at the other stuff that Mozilla is allocating resources for, it becomes clear that maintaining RSS support would be a drop in the bucket. RSS could have been fixed for a fraction of the cost of one of their many dead-end research projects, or they could have swapped out the canapés for a cheaper finger food at one of their events. The fact that anyone would call RSS "niche" is part of the problem; something can still be important even if not a lot of people use it at the moment. But that kind of nuance is something lost with this toxic market-driven mentality. Accessibility features are also "niche", should they be removed? Many people consider RSS to be a type accessibility feature. Should all accessibility features be relegated to add-ons that must be manually sought out and installed? I don't know the details of the high level decisions at Mozilla, but I also can't help but notice that all of the decisions made by Mozilla seem to align perfectly with the interests of companies Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon. Sending alerts to users and getting them to navigate to your platform is what big content wants. Mozilla agrees that that is the future and that RSS is obsolete and apparently holding them back. Mozilla has no problem implementing whatever Google wants and always being behind Chrome. Mozilla also decided to legitimize web DRM with its embrace of EME. > (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.) Honestly this is a whole other discussion, but I would dispute that they made the right decision. If browser extensions are just toys to you, then I'm sure you appreciate how streamlined and simple they are now.
jjordan 6y ago
Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/ https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been on the web a long time and have yet to come across a faster way to check all my favorite sites at once.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
  Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox, and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open Internet.
- broken_symlink 6y ago
  I once wrote a little python script that did something like this in the systray.
z3t4 6y ago
RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads). It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter. As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > RSS and bookmarks bypass Google Bollocks! Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier. And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out new content from the old when you visit an article website. Google isn’t to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS (Google Reader’s closing was a symptom, not a cause), it’s the content websites’ webmasters who saw that by allowing machine-readable access to their content index means that users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they included their whole article content in the RSS feed then they’re missing out on potentially all of the advertising revenue - that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers. RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn’t be popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to download each audio file each time a new release is made - so the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising baked into the podcast content. Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above: allowing direct access to content means less pageviews. Somewhat concerningly, we’re seeing people use Twitter to do things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like live service uptime status updates. Finally, there’s the usability issue: it’s difficult to describe what RSS is or why it’s good to a layperson. Ssure, today we can just say “an RSS feed is just like a podcast, but for normal web content, or anything at all” - but back in the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had difficulty understanding what a “syndication feed” was - the terminology “feed” implied to me it was a unidirectional continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don’t forget the format-war with Atom too.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dleslie 6y ago
Mozilla _critically_ lost its way. No RSS, no NNTP, no EMail; but a paid news service, opt-out services and so on. The data services which provided content-without-markup were abandoned, and the fluff and garbage were embraced. It was supposed to be that Mozilla would be a beacon of light in a murky web, but it has lost itself in the void.
- evolve2k 6y ago
  Mozilla have been very clear that they don’t have the resources to win every battle. They’re slipping in the browser wars. I too would love them to fight every battle, but I understand the importance of them managing their limited resources and fighting those battles that can help them towards ‘winning the bigger war’ and staying alive.

thelazydogsback 6y ago

Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.

apostacy 6y ago
That is pretty cool. But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all. RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing. Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
- thelazydogsback 6y ago
  Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.
  - apostacy 6y ago
    I appreciate you sharing. I didn't mean to shoot you down or anything.
    - thelazydogsback 6y ago
      No problem -- I didn't take it that way at all!
- synchrone 6y ago
  as far as i can see, RSSHub does exactly that, and supports as many as 536 scraped sources (of varying caliber) at https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes. It's not an outlandish amount of work, if lots of people chip in with their favorite source.
  - apostacy 6y ago
    I see what you are saying, but I still think it is a far cry from having content providers simply providing the feeds themselves. In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine generating them, any substitute for the content creator providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed captions from the audio, but I still don't think we should let television producers off the hook for providing captions. RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate RSS. I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a "standard", and because they felt that it was popular enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads, and their control of the presentation. And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it. And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the web.
- jjordan 6y ago
  Maybe what we need is an accessibility equivalent to the SSL Server Test. Input your domain and it gives you a letter grade on how accessible your site is. RSS access should be heavily weighted, of course.
  - hopesthoughts 6y ago
    When I look for an RSS feed, it's usually to see if it's updating, not because of any accessibility concerns. A lot of times, I'll find broken feeds. However, if a site is really giving me trouble with navigation, I'll rely on the RSS feed for reading purposes.
Fiveplus 6y ago
I used to be a big fan of RSS feeds but with their demise I started using Feedly. It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
- danielrm26 6y ago
  Feedly is an RSS reader. It’s not one or the other.
  - Fiveplus 6y ago
    I should've been clearer above, I meant the google RSS reader [feeds]. Either way, your point stands to anyone wondering about the identity of feedly :)

sergiotapia 6y ago

I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.

chrismorgan 6y ago
The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897. I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
- apostacy 6y ago
  > The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897. Then that is a great justification for improving it then. Or at least bundling an RSS add-on. Mozilla felt that bundling Pocket was ok, but not one of the many great RSS add-ons? > I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. The truth is, they did not see it as an essential part of the web, worth implementing. If you look at the other stuff that Mozilla is allocating resources for, it becomes clear that maintaining RSS support would be a drop in the bucket. RSS could have been fixed for a fraction of the cost of one of their many dead-end research projects, or they could have swapped out the canapés for a cheaper finger food at one of their events. The fact that anyone would call RSS "niche" is part of the problem; something can still be important even if not a lot of people use it at the moment. But that kind of nuance is something lost with this toxic market-driven mentality. Accessibility features are also "niche", should they be removed? Many people consider RSS to be a type accessibility feature. Should all accessibility features be relegated to add-ons that must be manually sought out and installed? I don't know the details of the high level decisions at Mozilla, but I also can't help but notice that all of the decisions made by Mozilla seem to align perfectly with the interests of companies Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon. Sending alerts to users and getting them to navigate to your platform is what big content wants. Mozilla agrees that that is the future and that RSS is obsolete and apparently holding them back. Mozilla has no problem implementing whatever Google wants and always being behind Chrome. Mozilla also decided to legitimize web DRM with its embrace of EME. > (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.) Honestly this is a whole other discussion, but I would dispute that they made the right decision. If browser extensions are just toys to you, then I'm sure you appreciate how streamlined and simple they are now.

jjordan 6y ago

Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/ https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been on the web a long time and have yet to come across a faster way to check all my favorite sites at once.

ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox, and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open Internet.
broken_symlink 6y ago
I once wrote a little python script that did something like this in the systray.

z3t4 6y ago

RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads). It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter. As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> RSS and bookmarks bypass Google Bollocks! Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier. And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out new content from the old when you visit an article website. Google isn’t to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS (Google Reader’s closing was a symptom, not a cause), it’s the content websites’ webmasters who saw that by allowing machine-readable access to their content index means that users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they included their whole article content in the RSS feed then they’re missing out on potentially all of the advertising revenue - that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers. RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn’t be popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to download each audio file each time a new release is made - so the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising baked into the podcast content. Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above: allowing direct access to content means less pageviews. Somewhat concerningly, we’re seeing people use Twitter to do things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like live service uptime status updates. Finally, there’s the usability issue: it’s difficult to describe what RSS is or why it’s good to a layperson. Ssure, today we can just say “an RSS feed is just like a podcast, but for normal web content, or anything at all” - but back in the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had difficulty understanding what a “syndication feed” was - the terminology “feed” implied to me it was a unidirectional continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don’t forget the format-war with Atom too.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dleslie 6y ago

Mozilla _critically_ lost its way. No RSS, no NNTP, no EMail; but a paid news service, opt-out services and so on. The data services which provided content-without-markup were abandoned, and the fluff and garbage were embraced. It was supposed to be that Mozilla would be a beacon of light in a murky web, but it has lost itself in the void.

evolve2k 6y ago
Mozilla have been very clear that they don’t have the resources to win every battle. They’re slipping in the browser wars. I too would love them to fight every battle, but I understand the importance of them managing their limited resources and fighting those battles that can help them towards ‘winning the bigger war’ and staying alive.