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After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm h

After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird

onli 5y ago
This would be more about making RSS visible for browser users than making Firefox a feedreader. There are many great readers. But the one thing where RSS really is worse off now than it was a decade ago is discoverability. That hurts the open web. Making a change in a browser could improve the situation a lot, and the one browser that would fit to that is Firefox. And it would be a huge marketing win for Mozilla in tech circles.
beagle3 5y ago
After more than 20 years with Thunderbird as my reader (first NNTP, then RSS), I switched to NewsBlur and am much happier. While thunderbird is a good reader, it doesn’t synchroniZe “already seen” across machines, and many feeds only have the latest 10 items in their XML feed, so unless you poll continuously, you are likely to miss updates. I like to occasionally take a week off the world (without the laptop), and many of my feeds have more than 10 updates a week (some more than 10 a day).
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  This is, just like the failure to link to a stylesheet in the feed, IMO a failure on the publisher's part. The feed should support pagination with the appropriate rel=next links in the feed. WordPress is interesting in that it supports pagination through a URL parameter (e.g. ?paged=2), but it doesn't actually advertise them...
  - beagle3 5y ago
    Indeed, but it is what it is. You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates, or use a continuous server based solution and receive all of them. I’m a 4-year happy paying customer of NewsBlur, which I wholeheartedly recommend.
    - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
      > You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates Not true; maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last comment. As an example, for platforms like WordPress that support pagination, if you miss some updates that were posted to alice.example.net/feed/, then you can add alice.example.net/feed/?paged=2 (and ?paged=3 and so on) to Thunderbird until it bridges the gap between items you had before going dark and what you have now. It works for accessing a blog's backlog of content, too; it's possible to discover a blog today with regular (let's say weekly) updates stretching back e.g. 8 months and still get at the old ones. In fact, I've done this to go back and ingest years of posts after first discovering a feed only recently and then realizing that I've been missing out by not having it on my radar since the beginning.
bArray 5y ago
Just to warn you, Thunderbird keeps corrupting my RSS feeds and failing to pull them in. I have since switched to Akregator and this is much better.

After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird

onli 5y ago

This would be more about making RSS visible for browser users than making Firefox a feedreader. There are many great readers. But the one thing where RSS really is worse off now than it was a decade ago is discoverability. That hurts the open web. Making a change in a browser could improve the situation a lot, and the one browser that would fit to that is Firefox. And it would be a huge marketing win for Mozilla in tech circles.

beagle3 5y ago

After more than 20 years with Thunderbird as my reader (first NNTP, then RSS), I switched to NewsBlur and am much happier. While thunderbird is a good reader, it doesn’t synchroniZe “already seen” across machines, and many feeds only have the latest 10 items in their XML feed, so unless you poll continuously, you are likely to miss updates. I like to occasionally take a week off the world (without the laptop), and many of my feeds have more than 10 updates a week (some more than 10 a day).

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
This is, just like the failure to link to a stylesheet in the feed, IMO a failure on the publisher's part. The feed should support pagination with the appropriate rel=next links in the feed. WordPress is interesting in that it supports pagination through a URL parameter (e.g. ?paged=2), but it doesn't actually advertise them...
- beagle3 5y ago
  Indeed, but it is what it is. You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates, or use a continuous server based solution and receive all of them. I’m a 4-year happy paying customer of NewsBlur, which I wholeheartedly recommend.
  - pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
    > You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates Not true; maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last comment. As an example, for platforms like WordPress that support pagination, if you miss some updates that were posted to alice.example.net/feed/, then you can add alice.example.net/feed/?paged=2 (and ?paged=3 and so on) to Thunderbird until it bridges the gap between items you had before going dark and what you have now. It works for accessing a blog's backlog of content, too; it's possible to discover a blog today with regular (let's say weekly) updates stretching back e.g. 8 months and still get at the old ones. In fact, I've done this to go back and ingest years of posts after first discovering a feed only recently and then realizing that I've been missing out by not having it on my radar since the beginning.

bArray 5y ago

Just to warn you, Thunderbird keeps corrupting my RSS feeds and failing to pull them in. I have since switched to Akregator and this is much better.