12 ms·

We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

329 points by Flenser 3y ago

rabbits_2002 3y ago
Google is a joke how does something like this even happen Sometimes I think the jokes about Google having no management are true.
bhaak 3y ago
> If you've ended up here, chances are you're looking to subscribe to our blog in your RSS feed. > Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution. Well, that certainly means they are going to have RSS feeds in the future. Right?
- soco 3y ago
  How low is to remove a thing then claim "oops we will". Really, what's wrong with just removing whatever they want to remove? Do they really have to blatantly lie about it? How's that helping?
- toyg 3y ago
  No no no, they're working on "a solution". That means they will built Google Updates™, a locked-down walled-garden push system with premium tiers.
  - askonomm 3y ago
    Which they will a year later kill because it didn't become the new AdSense.
rado 3y ago
Found this HN post via RSS...
- SanjayMehta 3y ago
  Same here.
throwuxiytayq 3y ago
It's too much work and effort to maintain such complicated legacy technology for the incredibly busy brain of a Google engineer.
- mikro2nd 3y ago
  Yeah... it's not like they working code already in place or anything.
  - shmageggy 3y ago
    But think of the maintenance cost. It must be dollars per year!
- coolgoose 3y ago
  I love the smell of sarcasm in the morning. But considering how hostile Google has been lately to the 'open' web I am not surprized.
- rollcat 3y ago
  I wonder what's going on in the head of a person that decides to axe RSS support. "Surely my user base will continue coming to the landing page of my website to check for updates every day."
  - gmerc 3y ago
    bingo; you just found the kpi. everything needs a kpi. Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team. Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment). zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      I mean Facebook can do it, a random blog can't. Google killed Plus, so it's not like when they killed Reader. They just like killing things I guess?
sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat. Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
- ddorian43 3y ago
  10-20 years later in a court case, these emails will show up.
  - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
    Exactly, thank you my friend. I'm happy to see that such ideas are entering the mainstream. (Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore) Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.
- bArray 3y ago
  > Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat. But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control. > Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better. Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.' [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
    You forgot Feedburner that Google used to monetized feeds. Almost all bloggers I followed in Google Reader used it to track and monetize. Google had a lot of control over RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner
reddalo 3y ago
People don't understand how much RSS is useful... I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  > I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web. I’m happy, it lead to an explosion of available readers, including many self-hosted ones.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    Walkers did the same with their crisps ("chips" for left-ponders), made them healthy by reducing the fat content, disgusting, like eating dried leaves. End result: a wealth of new crisp brands and people keen to try them. My favourite, Salty Dog [1], couldn't have happened without Walkers pissing on their own chips ("fries" for left-ponders). [1] https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps
    - pmarreck 3y ago
      Did they get the memo that fat isn't really the enemy? (well, satfat still not ideal, but...)
- SanjayMehta 3y ago
  NetNewsWire on ios+macos+icloud for sync That’s the best solution if you’re on Apple.
  - 911e 3y ago
    My man so we are at least two fans of the app
  - rado 3y ago
    This is one of the best apps of any kind on any platform. It just works flawlessly.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
prartichoke 3y ago
I have the feeling they're currently in the final stages of development for an alternative and want to remove RSS from all their stuff right now to preemptively avoid people lamenting its sudden removal then.
- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  Maybe I'm to wishful, but if that's the case, then it's probably related to the Fediverse.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Why don't we use Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera and so on?
- toyg 3y ago
  I do.
- Akashic101 3y ago
  Only one of those browsers you listed does not use Chromium
  - einpoklum 3y ago
    I did not realize it was that bad. Opera too? Maybe resistance _is_ futile? :-(
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      > Opera too? Sadly yes, Presto died many moons ago. I still miss the old Opera, when it wasn't owned by a Chinese company and had it's own rendering engine. But building a browser is expensive, a rendering engine even more so. We won't pay the cost of developing software, so we can't have nice things.
    - rovr138 3y ago
      yep, since 2013
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Safari here.
prartichoke 3y ago
Watch them slowly remove every RSS feed they operate, so when they come up with their own proprietary solution in 6 months nobody can lament their "sudden" removal of RSS.
- troupo 3y ago
  Slowly remove RSS from everything and in the and claim that "RSS is dying tech, no one uses it, we have metrics to show it"
eviks 3y ago
> Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution. RSS could be that solution!
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  > we're actively working on a solution Yeah exactly, what kind of bs is that
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    "we're actively working on a replacement" doesn't sound as good.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    "Sign up for our email newsletter"
- mrweasel 3y ago
  I was wondering about that wording as well, it's such a weird way to word it. You had a feature, you took it way, and now you're working on a solution... for what? Did Google develop a new internal blogging platform and just didn't get around to supporting RSS?
  - hexmiles 3y ago
    It seems so if I read this right: https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/111448166953123004 https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...
fredgrott 3y ago
*-in-cheek-on Google management too busy doing evil
jwr 3y ago
RSS is not aligned with Google's business goals.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  Why? RSS can be monetized. It was monetized by Google before they killed Reader to force people to use Google+. Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.
  - JeffSnazz 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jwr 3y ago
    It can kind-of be monetized, but Google isn't just about monetization, it's about control. That's why we get stuff like AMP or more and more limiting version of Chrome pushed down our throats. RSS is way too open and difficult to control.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    'can be monetized' isn't enough today. The modern internet is a shopping mall: Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, "tipping" people $5 on a livestream, subscribing to a paid newsletter or Patreon.... that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.
pacifika 3y ago
Guess they don’t want people to read their pages.
gabrielfernado 3y ago
[dead]
jug 3y ago
I tried using RSS Generators like https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and even a graphical one, but it looks like this isn't a static site but there's some sort of delayed fetch of the posts that messes them up. Regardless how much I tried, I could only get it to fetch the top nav bar. I don't really think first of intentional malice to spite everyone else too, but maybe this is the same reason their own RSS feed generator no longer works either. Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.
hennell 3y ago
I feel pleased that me as a single web dev with minimal money and few smarts, has managed to successfully implement rss on all blogs or blog like things I've made. Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  The RSS hit doesn't contribute to some program manager's 'engagement' metric on the developer docs site, so we don't need it anymore!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
omneity 3y ago
If keeping up with Google dev blogs is important to you, at Monitoro[0] we support alerts even if the website doesn't offer RSS. You can also catch specific updates, for example if a new post mentions a Google tool you're using at work. Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions. [0]: https://monitoro.co https://monitoro.co
padjo 3y ago
“Unfortunately” - c’mon it wasn’t an act of God that removed them
HunOL 3y ago
I think this thread could good place to share services (self-hosted or paid) that allow to monitor site for changes and make rss/send notification.
- rovr138 3y ago
  I use ChangeDetection, - https://changedetection.io/#features https://changedetection.io/#features - https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io > Create RSS feeds based on changes in web content
LeoNatan25 3y ago
They are “actively working on a solution”, because it requires a Google-sized brain and 28477382 work hours to maintain an RSS feed of a blog. What a silly company.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
Not sure if it counts as dev blog but https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ still has RSS and Atom feeds, I guess not everything got nuked.
- kevincox 3y ago
  googleblog.com runs on Blogger so has full RSS support. Presumably these other blogs were using something "custom" and after some rewrite/overhaul RSS support didn't hit the priority line. In a cohesive organization they would improve Blogger to fulfill their needs, but instead they just waste resources recreating a one-off solution over and over again.
vishnuharidas 3y ago
RSS reader software won't be successful. RSS reader should be built into the browser and every time you open the browser, the RSS feed should be the landing page. Every time you open a new tab, it should show a minimal feed that can be fully expanded.
- carrozo 3y ago
  Yes! Why isn’t this the case already?
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Firefox used to have this feature, sort of. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    This stuff was cash money. Firefox's RSS and Atom support used to be amazing, especially with extensions.
hliyan 3y ago
The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly. I recently had to modify 150+ accounts in a Google Workspace. Twenty years ago, I would be doing this in a Unix environment with a very simple shell script. Instead, I had to click-copy-paste-click, 20 times per page, like a monkey. I'm sure there must be some sort of API, but it would have taken 100 times the time it would have taken to write a simple command line script. In the quest for more and more human eyeballs, the web is becoming less and less machine friendly.
- jordanthoms 3y ago
  Your general point definitely stands - there is a pretty nice third party solution for google workspace though: https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM
  - d3w4s9 3y ago
    I doubt how many admins are comfortable with (or allowed to) using a non-approved third-party tool to manage their organization, despite open source and all that
    - oefrha 3y ago
      The third party tool is based on the official google-api-python-client. It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts.
      - rlpb 3y ago
        > It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts. That's not a fair comparison. There's a big difference between your own ad hoc shell script (or command line or whatever) that you fully understand, and downloading and running third party code without any kind of audit. Meanwhile, the industry keeps talking about "software supply chain".
      - cudder 3y ago
        `src/gam/__init__.py` alone is over 3 MB of code that's not from `google-api-python-client`. Combine all the ad hoc shell scripts I've ever written and it probably wouldn't be that much.
bitcharmer 3y ago
There's a ton of smart people working at Google. Just none in the management
renegat0x0 3y ago
I think this site, is not well scrap-able without selenium. Google products however rely on web scraping because of Google search. It is a hypocrisy of sorts.
InCityDreams 3y ago
'Google has stopped...', or 'Google no longer...', 'Google have removed'. As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed, looks like it's time to get a new email provider (as well) . @ yahoo seem to have few(er?) problems. There are probably others. Can anyone recommend a good search engine?
- einpoklum 3y ago
  > As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger should take care of it. I've never seen any ads on YouTube (except the ones the stream includes inherently).
  - rchaud 3y ago
    It's unusably slow on desktop Firefox with UBO active. This was not the case for a long time. They're degrading the experience on non-Chrome browsers intentionally.
    - einpoklum 3y ago
      I'm not experiencing that. Granted, I have 16 GB of RAM, and browsers are memory hogs, but my CPU is a Core i5-7600K with no overclocking, so not something super-strong. Are you sure your experience is common rather than anecdotal?
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Mine is on MacOS.
        einpoklum 3y ago
        I use Devuan GNU/Linux, with Cinnamon as the desktop environment. Maybe there's some MacOS (or *BSD) specific issue?
surprisetalk 3y ago
https://kill-the-newsletter.com https://kill-the-newsletter.com please donate: https://patreon.com/leafac https://patreon.com/leafac
gsky 3y ago
The real crime is using Google tools/libraries
Nekorosu 3y ago
Google's fight against open technologies continues.
squarefoot 3y ago
Let me guess... so users are forced to load a web page which will show them ads that couldn't fit into RSS records?
kenniskrag 3y ago
which rss reader do you use?
- awkwardpotato 3y ago
  Personally I use NewNewsWire. Great simple and unobtrusive OSS mobile app. https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
svat 3y ago
"Removed" implies it was there at some point; is this true? Or has this blog just never had RSS support? (I searched for this blog in Feedly and it didn't show up any older feed, but that may not be a reliable method for checking?)
- KomoD 3y ago
  Yes, it used to have RSS then they migrated to a new publishing platform that doesn't support RSS For now this can be used: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog or /articles or /case-studies https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2
xorcist 3y ago
RSS requires a lot of developer resources to work with. AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it? Sorry, we tried everything but the user agent support for Javascript in RSS is simply lacking. Unfortunately, it has to be dropped, there is no alternative.
- driverdan 3y ago
  > AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it? You don't.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- scbrg 3y ago
  This may be the most Poe's Law HN comment I have ever read. Bravo :-)
- flerchin 3y ago
  I think this is satire. This is satire right?
mogoh 3y ago
Bramus, a google engineer did an inoffical workaround: https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/111448166953123004 https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...
kjeksfjes 3y ago
Cue... - commercial AI refusing to generate RSS XMLs from a webpages' content. - "illegal" AI that is willing to browse webpages without disclosing that their'e bots
smusamashah 3y ago
When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline of RSS.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  RSS is the antithesis to the interest of link aggregators like Google. It is no accident they didn't support it properly.
  - pluc 3y ago
    Does nobody remember that RSS integration with browser (Firefox Live Bookmarks anyone?) was spectacular before Chrome showed up? They easily could have integrated it a hundred different times a hundred different ways. They didn't. They've even shut their own RSS reader. They don't want content to be available to your standards, they want it available to advertisers'.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    RSS readers had limited javascript support, which meant ads wouldn't show. Guess who sells more website ad inventory than anyone else?
- Barrin92 3y ago
  Vivaldi has that built in and a good RSS reader as well. Still very useful.
  - riidom 3y ago
    I use Vivaldi to detect the RSS and grab the URL, but actually have my RSS in Thunderbird. Back in the days of good Opera, I had mail, chat, RSS all inside the browser. But for some reason I couldn't get back to that when Vivaldi finally released the mail beta. So not saying Vivaldi's RSS is bad, mostly want to mention that Thunderbird can do RSS too, if one happens to use it anyway.
macinjosh 3y ago
To be fair, HN doesn't offer RSS either. We need it!
- lapcat 3y ago
  For unofficial support, see https://hnrss.org https://hnrss.org
kinlan 3y ago
Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul
- hliyan 3y ago
  Nice touch in the HN bio! > RSS is alive https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml
  - kinlan 3y ago
    Heh. Very apropos (it's been in there for a while).
- lapcat 3y ago
  > We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died. > I needed our team to hit a deadline Why?
  - kinlan 3y ago
    There's lots of reasons some of which I can't go into details about, but there are some that I can: There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change) The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions? In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken. Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important announcement was posted: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3 https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to...
zlg_codes 3y ago
Google, you helped kill widespread RSS adoption to begin with. You can't be trusted with anything technology.
pentagrama 3y ago
I noticed the same for Google's site https://web.dev/ https://web.dev/ The last article pushed to the feed was "Changes to the web.dev infrastructure" few months ago https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration The feed still there but with no updates https://web.dev/feed.xml https://web.dev/feed.xml and on the site you can see new articles published. Is sad that on a infrastructure revamp of a modern site, the RSS feed was left out of the features list (at least for now).
listmaking 3y ago
This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team? In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone to just fix this internally. (Disclaimer: work at Google but not on anything related to this; all my information comes from links in this HN thread. Which is ironic / symptom of the same problem.) [1]: https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 and https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss / https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss [2]: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog [3]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- culi 3y ago
  when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?
  - tehlike 3y ago
    Arrival of Sundar as CEO was the obvious sign, but probably few years before then.
  - listmaking 3y ago
    Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the first place is what Google did wrong.) This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.
jacquesm 3y ago
Maybe they can find the code for reader somewhere on a backup disk?
jrm4 3y ago
Broadly, the entire tech community should be embarrassed about the extent to which they actually collectively "believed" Google's stated purpose for killing Google Reader; if we had effectively called out that utter BS a while ago, I genuinely believe the entire web would be a better place today.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related RSS talk today: Please, Expose Your RSS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595855
cyanydeez 3y ago
what year is it
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
It makes sense. After killing Google Reader making RSS less relevant helps to justify that as the right decision :)
butz 3y ago
Wasn't Google planing to add some sort of RSS support in Chrome? Or did the experiment end as a failure?
tech234a 3y ago
It's worth noting that this new site replaces one that was just 3 years old, released in December 2020, here's the announcement of that version of the site: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome Loss of the ability to contribute via GitHub pull request is unfortunate, hopefully there will be a better way to contribute again in the future.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Solution found. curl -sA "" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sitemap.xml \ |sed -n ' 1i\ <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>\ <rss version="2.0">\ <channel> s}$<loc>$$.*$$</loc>$}\ <item>\ <title>\2</title>\ <description>\2</description>\ <link>\2</link>\ </item>}p; $a\ </channel>\ </rss> ' If this isn't correct RSS, please forgive me. I'm not an "engineer". I prefer a personalised, simple HTML made from URLs as opposed to XML. I write filters to generate this in C. NB. The public sitemap.xml still refers to an (unofficial?) RSS feed.
ppetty 3y ago
Bard solvable?

329 points by Flenser 3y ago

rabbits_2002 3y ago

Google is a joke how does something like this even happen Sometimes I think the jokes about Google having no management are true.

bhaak 3y ago

> If you've ended up here, chances are you're looking to subscribe to our blog in your RSS feed. > Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution. Well, that certainly means they are going to have RSS feeds in the future. Right?

soco 3y ago
How low is to remove a thing then claim "oops we will". Really, what's wrong with just removing whatever they want to remove? Do they really have to blatantly lie about it? How's that helping?
toyg 3y ago
No no no, they're working on "a solution". That means they will built Google Updates™, a locked-down walled-garden push system with premium tiers.
- askonomm 3y ago
  Which they will a year later kill because it didn't become the new AdSense.

rado 3y ago

Found this HN post via RSS...

SanjayMehta 3y ago
Same here.

throwuxiytayq 3y ago

It's too much work and effort to maintain such complicated legacy technology for the incredibly busy brain of a Google engineer.

mikro2nd 3y ago
Yeah... it's not like they working code already in place or anything.
- shmageggy 3y ago
  But think of the maintenance cost. It must be dollars per year!
coolgoose 3y ago
I love the smell of sarcasm in the morning. But considering how hostile Google has been lately to the 'open' web I am not surprized.
rollcat 3y ago
I wonder what's going on in the head of a person that decides to axe RSS support. "Surely my user base will continue coming to the landing page of my website to check for updates every day."
- gmerc 3y ago
  bingo; you just found the kpi. everything needs a kpi. Facebook did that with emails - slowly remove all the content to turn them into traffic generators for the feed team. Hilariously when they launched workplace, the corporate productive product, they did the same thing, viciously spamming you with emails that have the first 15 characters of the workplace post that triggered them (and 2 more for the notification and every comment). zero respect for your time, everything must drive traffic.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    I mean Facebook can do it, a random blog can't. Google killed Plus, so it's not like when they killed Reader. They just like killing things I guess?

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago

Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat. Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.

ddorian43 3y ago
10-20 years later in a court case, these emails will show up.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  Exactly, thank you my friend. I'm happy to see that such ideas are entering the mainstream. (Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore) Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.
bArray 3y ago
> Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat. But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control. > Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better. Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.' [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  You forgot Feedburner that Google used to monetized feeds. Almost all bloggers I followed in Google Reader used it to track and monetize. Google had a lot of control over RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner

reddalo 3y ago

People don't understand how much RSS is useful... I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.

Semaphor 3y ago
> I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web. I’m happy, it lead to an explosion of available readers, including many self-hosted ones.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  Walkers did the same with their crisps ("chips" for left-ponders), made them healthy by reducing the fat content, disgusting, like eating dried leaves. End result: a wealth of new crisp brands and people keen to try them. My favourite, Salty Dog [1], couldn't have happened without Walkers pissing on their own chips ("fries" for left-ponders). [1] https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    Did they get the memo that fat isn't really the enemy? (well, satfat still not ideal, but...)
SanjayMehta 3y ago
NetNewsWire on ios+macos+icloud for sync That’s the best solution if you’re on Apple.
- 911e 3y ago
  My man so we are at least two fans of the app
- rado 3y ago
  This is one of the best apps of any kind on any platform. It just works flawlessly.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

prartichoke 3y ago

I have the feeling they're currently in the final stages of development for an alternative and want to remove RSS from all their stuff right now to preemptively avoid people lamenting its sudden removal then.

ivanmontillam 3y ago
Maybe I'm to wishful, but if that's the case, then it's probably related to the Fediverse.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Why don't we use Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera and so on?

toyg 3y ago
I do.
Akashic101 3y ago
Only one of those browsers you listed does not use Chromium
- einpoklum 3y ago
  I did not realize it was that bad. Opera too? Maybe resistance _is_ futile? :-(
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    > Opera too? Sadly yes, Presto died many moons ago. I still miss the old Opera, when it wasn't owned by a Chinese company and had it's own rendering engine. But building a browser is expensive, a rendering engine even more so. We won't pay the cost of developing software, so we can't have nice things.
  - rovr138 3y ago
    yep, since 2013
geerlingguy 3y ago
Safari here.

prartichoke 3y ago

Watch them slowly remove every RSS feed they operate, so when they come up with their own proprietary solution in 6 months nobody can lament their "sudden" removal of RSS.

troupo 3y ago
Slowly remove RSS from everything and in the and claim that "RSS is dying tech, no one uses it, we have metrics to show it"

eviks 3y ago

> Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution. RSS could be that solution!

Alifatisk 3y ago
> we're actively working on a solution Yeah exactly, what kind of bs is that
- mysterydip 3y ago
  "we're actively working on a replacement" doesn't sound as good.
- rchaud 3y ago
  "Sign up for our email newsletter"
mrweasel 3y ago
I was wondering about that wording as well, it's such a weird way to word it. You had a feature, you took it way, and now you're working on a solution... for what? Did Google develop a new internal blogging platform and just didn't get around to supporting RSS?
- hexmiles 3y ago
  It seems so if I read this right: https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/111448166953123004 https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...

fredgrott 3y ago

*-in-cheek-on Google management too busy doing evil

jwr 3y ago

RSS is not aligned with Google's business goals.

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
Why? RSS can be monetized. It was monetized by Google before they killed Reader to force people to use Google+. Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.
- JeffSnazz 3y ago
  [dead]
- jwr 3y ago
  It can kind-of be monetized, but Google isn't just about monetization, it's about control. That's why we get stuff like AMP or more and more limiting version of Chrome pushed down our throats. RSS is way too open and difficult to control.
- rchaud 3y ago
  'can be monetized' isn't enough today. The modern internet is a shopping mall: Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, "tipping" people $5 on a livestream, subscribing to a paid newsletter or Patreon.... that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.

pacifika 3y ago

Guess they don’t want people to read their pages.

gabrielfernado 3y ago

[dead]

jug 3y ago

I tried using RSS Generators like https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and even a graphical one, but it looks like this isn't a static site but there's some sort of delayed fetch of the posts that messes them up. Regardless how much I tried, I could only get it to fetch the top nav bar. I don't really think first of intentional malice to spite everyone else too, but maybe this is the same reason their own RSS feed generator no longer works either. Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.

hennell 3y ago

I feel pleased that me as a single web dev with minimal money and few smarts, has managed to successfully implement rss on all blogs or blog like things I've made. Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.

wildrhythms 3y ago
The RSS hit doesn't contribute to some program manager's 'engagement' metric on the developer docs site, so we don't need it anymore!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

omneity 3y ago

If keeping up with Google dev blogs is important to you, at Monitoro[0] we support alerts even if the website doesn't offer RSS. You can also catch specific updates, for example if a new post mentions a Google tool you're using at work. Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions. [0]: https://monitoro.co https://monitoro.co

padjo 3y ago

“Unfortunately” - c’mon it wasn’t an act of God that removed them

HunOL 3y ago

I think this thread could good place to share services (self-hosted or paid) that allow to monitor site for changes and make rss/send notification.

rovr138 3y ago
I use ChangeDetection, - https://changedetection.io/#features https://changedetection.io/#features - https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io > Create RSS feeds based on changes in web content

LeoNatan25 3y ago

They are “actively working on a solution”, because it requires a Google-sized brain and 28477382 work hours to maintain an RSS feed of a blog. What a silly company.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago

Not sure if it counts as dev blog but https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ still has RSS and Atom feeds, I guess not everything got nuked.

kevincox 3y ago
googleblog.com runs on Blogger so has full RSS support. Presumably these other blogs were using something "custom" and after some rewrite/overhaul RSS support didn't hit the priority line. In a cohesive organization they would improve Blogger to fulfill their needs, but instead they just waste resources recreating a one-off solution over and over again.

vishnuharidas 3y ago

RSS reader software won't be successful. RSS reader should be built into the browser and every time you open the browser, the RSS feed should be the landing page. Every time you open a new tab, it should show a minimal feed that can be fully expanded.

carrozo 3y ago
Yes! Why isn’t this the case already?
the_snooze 3y ago
Firefox used to have this feature, sort of. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  This stuff was cash money. Firefox's RSS and Atom support used to be amazing, especially with extensions.

hliyan 3y ago

The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly. I recently had to modify 150+ accounts in a Google Workspace. Twenty years ago, I would be doing this in a Unix environment with a very simple shell script. Instead, I had to click-copy-paste-click, 20 times per page, like a monkey. I'm sure there must be some sort of API, but it would have taken 100 times the time it would have taken to write a simple command line script. In the quest for more and more human eyeballs, the web is becoming less and less machine friendly.

jordanthoms 3y ago
Your general point definitely stands - there is a pretty nice third party solution for google workspace though: https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM
- d3w4s9 3y ago
  I doubt how many admins are comfortable with (or allowed to) using a non-approved third-party tool to manage their organization, despite open source and all that
  - oefrha 3y ago
    The third party tool is based on the official google-api-python-client. It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts.
    - rlpb 3y ago
      > It’s about as non-approved as ad hoc shell scripts. That's not a fair comparison. There's a big difference between your own ad hoc shell script (or command line or whatever) that you fully understand, and downloading and running third party code without any kind of audit. Meanwhile, the industry keeps talking about "software supply chain".
    - cudder 3y ago
      `src/gam/__init__.py` alone is over 3 MB of code that's not from `google-api-python-client`. Combine all the ad hoc shell scripts I've ever written and it probably wouldn't be that much.

bitcharmer 3y ago

There's a ton of smart people working at Google. Just none in the management

renegat0x0 3y ago

I think this site, is not well scrap-able without selenium. Google products however rely on web scraping because of Google search. It is a hypocrisy of sorts.

InCityDreams 3y ago

'Google has stopped...', or 'Google no longer...', 'Google have removed'. As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed, looks like it's time to get a new email provider (as well) . @ yahoo seem to have few(er?) problems. There are probably others. Can anyone recommend a good search engine?

einpoklum 3y ago
> As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger should take care of it. I've never seen any ads on YouTube (except the ones the stream includes inherently).
- rchaud 3y ago
  It's unusably slow on desktop Firefox with UBO active. This was not the case for a long time. They're degrading the experience on non-Chrome browsers intentionally.
  - einpoklum 3y ago
    I'm not experiencing that. Granted, I have 16 GB of RAM, and browsers are memory hogs, but my CPU is a Core i5-7600K with no overclocking, so not something super-strong. Are you sure your experience is common rather than anecdotal?
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Mine is on MacOS.
      - einpoklum 3y ago
        I use Devuan GNU/Linux, with Cinnamon as the desktop environment. Maybe there's some MacOS (or *BSD) specific issue?

surprisetalk 3y ago

https://kill-the-newsletter.com https://kill-the-newsletter.com please donate: https://patreon.com/leafac https://patreon.com/leafac

gsky 3y ago

The real crime is using Google tools/libraries

Nekorosu 3y ago

Google's fight against open technologies continues.

squarefoot 3y ago

Let me guess... so users are forced to load a web page which will show them ads that couldn't fit into RSS records?

kenniskrag 3y ago

which rss reader do you use?

awkwardpotato 3y ago
Personally I use NewNewsWire. Great simple and unobtrusive OSS mobile app. https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

svat 3y ago

"Removed" implies it was there at some point; is this true? Or has this blog just never had RSS support? (I searched for this blog in Feedly and it didn't show up any older feed, but that may not be a reliable method for checking?)

KomoD 3y ago
Yes, it used to have RSS then they migrated to a new publishing platform that doesn't support RSS For now this can be used: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog or /articles or /case-studies https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2

xorcist 3y ago

RSS requires a lot of developer resources to work with. AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it? Sorry, we tried everything but the user agent support for Javascript in RSS is simply lacking. Unfortunately, it has to be dropped, there is no alternative.

driverdan 3y ago
> AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it? You don't.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
scbrg 3y ago
This may be the most Poe's Law HN comment I have ever read. Bravo :-)
flerchin 3y ago
I think this is satire. This is satire right?

mogoh 3y ago

Bramus, a google engineer did an inoffical workaround: https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/111448166953123004 https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...

kjeksfjes 3y ago

Cue... - commercial AI refusing to generate RSS XMLs from a webpages' content. - "illegal" AI that is willing to browse webpages without disclosing that their'e bots

smusamashah 3y ago

When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline of RSS.

rightbyte 3y ago
RSS is the antithesis to the interest of link aggregators like Google. It is no accident they didn't support it properly.
- pluc 3y ago
  Does nobody remember that RSS integration with browser (Firefox Live Bookmarks anyone?) was spectacular before Chrome showed up? They easily could have integrated it a hundred different times a hundred different ways. They didn't. They've even shut their own RSS reader. They don't want content to be available to your standards, they want it available to advertisers'.
- rchaud 3y ago
  RSS readers had limited javascript support, which meant ads wouldn't show. Guess who sells more website ad inventory than anyone else?
Barrin92 3y ago
Vivaldi has that built in and a good RSS reader as well. Still very useful.
- riidom 3y ago
  I use Vivaldi to detect the RSS and grab the URL, but actually have my RSS in Thunderbird. Back in the days of good Opera, I had mail, chat, RSS all inside the browser. But for some reason I couldn't get back to that when Vivaldi finally released the mail beta. So not saying Vivaldi's RSS is bad, mostly want to mention that Thunderbird can do RSS too, if one happens to use it anyway.

macinjosh 3y ago

To be fair, HN doesn't offer RSS either. We need it!

lapcat 3y ago
For unofficial support, see https://hnrss.org https://hnrss.org

kinlan 3y ago

Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site. We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after. We are working on making sure this lands asap. Paul

hliyan 3y ago
Nice touch in the HN bio! > RSS is alive https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml
- kinlan 3y ago
  Heh. Very apropos (it's been in there for a while).
lapcat 3y ago
> We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds. I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died. > I needed our team to hit a deadline Why?
- kinlan 3y ago
  There's lots of reasons some of which I can't go into details about, but there are some that I can: There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change) The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    Were the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling imposed on you from above, or were they your decisions? In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken. Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important announcement was posted: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3 https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to...

zlg_codes 3y ago

Google, you helped kill widespread RSS adoption to begin with. You can't be trusted with anything technology.

pentagrama 3y ago

I noticed the same for Google's site https://web.dev/ https://web.dev/ The last article pushed to the feed was "Changes to the web.dev infrastructure" few months ago https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration The feed still there but with no updates https://web.dev/feed.xml https://web.dev/feed.xml and on the site you can see new articles published. Is sad that on a infrastructure revamp of a modern site, the RSS feed was left out of the features list (at least for now).

listmaking 3y ago

This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team? In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone to just fix this internally. (Disclaimer: work at Google but not on anything related to this; all my information comes from links in this HN thread. Which is ironic / symptom of the same problem.) [1]: https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 and https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss / https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss [2]: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog [3]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
culi 3y ago
when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?
- tehlike 3y ago
  Arrival of Sundar as CEO was the obvious sign, but probably few years before then.
- listmaking 3y ago
  Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the first place is what Google did wrong.) This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.

jacquesm 3y ago

Maybe they can find the code for reader somewhere on a backup disk?

jrm4 3y ago

Broadly, the entire tech community should be embarrassed about the extent to which they actually collectively "believed" Google's stated purpose for killing Google Reader; if we had effectively called out that utter BS a while ago, I genuinely believe the entire web would be a better place today.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related RSS talk today: Please, Expose Your RSS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595855

cyanydeez 3y ago

what year is it

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

It makes sense. After killing Google Reader making RSS less relevant helps to justify that as the right decision :)

butz 3y ago

Wasn't Google planing to add some sort of RSS support in Chrome? Or did the experiment end as a failure?

tech234a 3y ago

It's worth noting that this new site replaces one that was just 3 years old, released in December 2020, here's the announcement of that version of the site: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome Loss of the ability to contribute via GitHub pull request is unfortunate, hopefully there will be a better way to contribute again in the future.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Solution found. curl -sA "" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sitemap.xml \ |sed -n ' 1i\ <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>\ <rss version="2.0">\ <channel> s}$<loc>$$.*$$</loc>$}\ <item>\ <title>\2</title>\ <description>\2</description>\ <link>\2</link>\ </item>}p; $a\ </channel>\ </rss> ' If this isn't correct RSS, please forgive me. I'm not an "engineer". I prefer a personalised, simple HTML made from URLs as opposed to XML. I write filters to generate this in C. NB. The public sitemap.xml still refers to an (unofficial?) RSS feed.

ppetty 3y ago

Bard solvable?