8 ms·
The 3-year old "Implement RSS natively in Chrome" bug just changed to "WontFix"
- doe88 14y agoOn this subject I happened to experience something funny. Maybe one year ago I installed a chrome extension (from the official chrome store) to provide an RSS icon directly in the URL bar in order to subscribe to RSS streams. So far so good, then I don't know when, maybe months later I noticed I had some random popups with ads, it was very strange since I use adblock, I tried to find where these ads were coming from, with no luck. Then a day, I used the chrome inspector to analyze a web page and I observed something strange, on every pages I visited an external javascript was loaded, long story short, turned out the chrome extension was a kind of spyware loading a javascript on every pages I visited and sometimes rising a popup. Maybe it took me more time to find it because I only use chrome mainly for testing, my main browser being Firefox, but this is the kind of experience who removed the little confidence I had on the chrome store, and extensions in general, I'm very careful now on what extensions I install particularly extensions needing to be loaded on every pages I visit.
- devindotcom 14y agoI just wish Google would have been straight-up about this, had a big blog post saying "Here is why we think RSS needs to be replaced, and we've got some big plans to replace it, which involve a, b, c, and existing standard d. It's a bit abrupt but we're coming out with X on timeline Y." Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.
- zobzu 14y agoThey don't have plans to replace it, they just want to kill it. So, they don't have much to say, except "use google+" "use google news","forget rss"
- philwelch 14y agoI think that "blog post" was called Google+.
- mdwrigh2 14y agoThis has nothing to do with thinking RSS is dead or needs to be replaced, or whatever. It's just closing a feature request that was never going to be implemented. It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways.
- pdx 14y agoReally? Strange timing then, don't you think?
- mdwrigh2 14y agoNo, I don't. RSS has been brought to the forefront over the last couple days, so the fact that someone thought of this bug is totally conceivable.
- grimgrin 14y agoThe bug was opened in 2010. It was changed to WontFix days after Google gave the Google Reader announcement. An unlikely coincidence.
- arcatek 14y agoHe does not say that it's a coincidence. He says that the event has probably brought back this issue, and that they have closed it to avoid false hope (since it should have been closed a long time ago according to the last post).
- laurent123456 14y agoAnd the closing message is quite clear about this, there's no hidden agenda there, they've just never planned to implement this (and rightly so in my opinion since it would have bloated the browser for something that can easily be an extension).
- 14y ago
- acdha 14y agoThat wake up call was when they strangled the Reader social community and started pushing Google+ so heavily on Gmail users: this social network wasn't going to be the kind of service you joined because you wanted to, it would be the sort which is even more hassle to ignore than to use.
- batgaijin 14y agoDude don't play stupid. They don't want people to separate content from form (which would you classify ads as?) which at end of the day means cutting out rss except for twitteressque tidbit links.
- SquareWheel 14y agoYou can certainly monetize via RSS ("click through to view the full story"). The is a push towards Google+ and reclaiming resources spent on Google Reader, nothing more.
- DannoHung 14y agoWhat makes you think Google has any intention of replacing RSS? They're the new Microsoft. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- streptomycin 14y agoAt least in the case of RSS, seems it was more like, Embrace, unembrace.
- zobzu 14y agoEmbrace, extinguish. They didn't need to extend, because virtually everyone using RSS was using their reader. In a way you could say they "extended" the readers, by providing a better one than existing ones. Better enough, that "nobody" cared to make a competitor, until it was clear it was going to die. So yeah, it's close enough to embrace, extend, extinguish to me.
- icebraining 14y agoThe Microsoft extinction was of every product except theirs. The purpose of EEE was to eliminate the competition and capture all the market, and it's kind of hard to do that when you eliminate yourself. Not to mention, that we can not really say they extended the readers, because the extensions didn't make them incompatible and so prevented people from moving, like the EEE did. I'm glad people are losing some misplaced trust in Google, but let's not blindingly apply labels to this.
- spinchange 14y agoThe theirs in this case is Google+
- streptomycin 14y agoDamn Google+ and it's 98% market share for providing automatic notifications when a site updates its content! Wait, what?
- andymoe 14y agoYeah, they did this whole RSS needs replaced thing already and they called it Atom... I think syndication and walled gardens don't mix very well. EDIT: Not that that is what's actually going on here. I don't even know why I'm commenting on this kind of frenzy creating garbage anyway :(
- fakeer 14y ago>>It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls. Can't say it's so in this case, but trust me it's the best way to be in some cases :-)
- philwelch 14y agoThe old Google would champion RSS as an open alternative to proprietary social networks. Now they're trying to kill it.
- eurleif 14y agoOr the "old Google" was just the first phase of embrace/extend/extinguish, and you didn't realize.
- shortsightedsid 14y agoDo no evil as long as Wall Street is happy - seems to be their real motto.
- zobzu 14y agoDo no evil to share holders. Oh, you mean, like everybody. Ok!
- Kerrick 14y ago"Do no evil" is not the same as "Do every possible good thing forever."
- philwelch 14y agoGoing out of your way to kill technologies that compete with your proprietary social network qualifies as evil in my book.
- minwcnt5 14y ago"Not going out of your way to support technologies you aren't interested in" is not the same as "Going out of your way to kill technologies that compete with your proprietary social network".
- sbuk 14y agoBut when not supporting these open technologies very obviously benefits your proprietary social network, it is.
- carlcory 14y agoThe 1600+ people watching that bug, and the millions using reader are the minority. RSS is for hackers, and Google doesn't want to invest in those people. (Us)
- acdha 14y agoThat's like saying HTML is for hackers: ordinary users shouldn't need to look at the raw serialization format if the service is any good. The many not hackers I interacted with on the old reader appreciated the way they could keep track of interesting things even if they were only shallowly aware of how it worked.
- sp332 14y agoRSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.
- zanny 14y agoIt is worth mentioning a large part of the reason RSS is so reclusive is that none of the browsers kept the "subscribe via RSS" button in the nav bar Firefox had 6 years ago. Back then it was one click to add feeds to the browser, and anyone could use it. Now you have to go out of your way looking for it.
- Maxious 14y agoTurning off any further comments on that bug is cute.
- itafroma 14y agoThat's been standard procedure for issues getting a lot of off-topic comments, or have the potential for the same, for some time, and it's definitely welcome when trying to track the status of popular features/bugs. The point of issue comments is to contribute to getting an issue fixed or resolved, not to act as a discussion thread. It's quite clear this was a done deal for some time and there's nothing further to discuss in that issue.
- duskwuff 14y agoEspecially given that every comment gets emailed to everyone who'd starred the bug. Leaving comments open (and receiving "BUT WHYYYY" comments) just annoys the hell out of everyone who'd starred it.
- Evbn 14y agoOnce a decision is made, further discussion is waste of everyone's energy. If the decision weren't final, the bug would remain open. People can post angree screeds elsewhere, like on their blogs' RSS feeds.
- lrei 14y agoI guess this makes it clear where Google stands on RSS. I think it's sad. RSS is a lot more open than the alternative: Twitter. Google seems to think that the result of an end to RSS will be good for them. Unless they are planning on buying twitter, I doubt it will be.
- Evbn 14y agoWhy do people keep mentioning Twitter? It's not even vaguely related to what RSS does, any more than, say, a digital radio station you could tune iTunes to.
- splawn 14y agoWhen you boil it down Twitter, Facebook, and G+ do the exact same thing as RSS,but they are all just easier,less flexible, closed and more centralized. You publish something and your subscribers receive it....seems at least vaguely related to me, imo.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoHow exactly is Twitter the exact same thing as RSS? I don't really see how someone tweeting about a new blog post being the same as what RSS does in any way other than being notified that a blog post has been written and possibly a title. I agree it is pubsub but that's pretty shaky. If the implication is that because we have Twitter then we do not need RSS .. I just think that's sort of ridiculous; is 140 characters the end of the road now? If not then Twitter is not a great solution to replace RSS. You can argue that RSS feeds have become like unread email but I think that is a different issue.
- splawn 14y agoI agree with you. I wasn't saying twitter is the exact same thing. Just vaguely related (as you said.. pubsub). Even without the character limit Twitter's functionality is a subset of what you can do with RSS.
- 14y ago
- AaronFriel 14y agoI'm starring the issue because I'm a slacktivist. I'm also going to become less reliant on Google services because when they decide other open standards are less profitable than getting more eyeballs Google+ I don't want to be stuck like I am now.
- martindale 14y agoI too have starred this issue.
- hrayr 14y agoI honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot? ...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome. I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as if we're considering this, when we're not. It just gets people's hopes up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action. This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.
- humanspecies 14y agoThe fuss is about Google embracing/extending and then suffocating every WWW technology they can't shove at least 20 ads into.
- nickpresta 14y agoSuch as?
- minwcnt5 14y agoHad Google actually even "embraced" RSS? I would say no. Reader isn't one of their core products and never was.
- streptomycin 14y agoIt wasn't a core product even when gmail had a prominent link to it at the top of the window? http://guijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gmail-more-menu.png http://guijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gmail-more-...
- ok_craig 14y agoDo you call everything that has an advertisement for it somewhere else a "core product"?
- kmfrk 14y agoThis makes me even more reluctant to switch to Chrome from Opera. I hope Opera continue to evolve their platform, WebKit engine or not. :/
- zanny 14y agoDissatisfied with webkit? Why not gecko(firefox)? =P
- kmfrk 14y agoThe engine switch doesn't bother me. It's just that Opera as a company is currently in flux, and they are discontinuing work in their Dragonfly web inspector, for instance, which does not at all suggest a good future ahead of Opera. Firefox is pretty much the polar opposite of Opera in terms of features, although I like their work on open standards like Opera's.
- rafski 14y agoRSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise. They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.
- ChrisClark 14y agoI see plenty of ads in my feeds. And nothing to stop Google from placing ads in Reader itself.
- kmfrk 14y agoThey still own FeedBurner, too, (until they shut it down).
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoMost of the ad supported feeds I'm subscribed to have one ad post per week. Most ad supported websites have many ads per article. Guess which medium makes Google more money?
- hysan 14y agoYou can change this to: 1 ad per week on a RSS feed vs 1 ad per week on an entire website and the answer would still turn out to be Ad Supported Websites. RSS users are an insanely small group compared to overall users on the web. So yeah, Google probably just decided that supporting RSS just isn't worth their money/time regardless of how it compares to its other services.
- holloway 14y agoBut you can't (reliably) run JavaScript in RSS which means no AdWords and no profile/context advertising. That's the stuff advertisers love, not one-size-fits-all banners
- ok_craig 14y ago
- jackmoore 14y agoThere is no conspiracy here. That feature wasn't going to be brought back to Chrome, and should have been closed a long time ago. Shutting down Reader shined a light on this issue, so if they hadn't closed it before now is a logical time to close it. Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just inviting people to grind their axes.
- curcumin 14y agoYep, Goog wants you to read news, find out about the world only through its walled-pages, read the penultimate paragraph of this naive article sums it up! http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-reader-it-was-self-defense/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-re...
- humanspecies 14y agoI can't believe we're going to see idiots actually wear google's spyware on their faces in a few months from now.
- Kiro 14y agoI'm one of those "idiots". You're welcome to say it to my face.
- humanspecies 14y agoIF YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR IT YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.
- OGinparadise 14y agoIF YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR IT YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. But Google is different. I swear. They don't even care about Wall Street. They said so.
- streptomycin 14y agoA company gets X in revenue from a product. Whether that X comes from ad revenue or subscription fees seems immaterial. Either way, Google Reader would have been a rounding error in the grand scheme of things at Google.
- icebraining 14y agoYou don't pay for Hacker News.
- lmm 14y agoThe HN readership is one of many things PG sells to companies in return for equity in them. This should have always been clear.
- icebraining 14y agoYes, my point is that being "the product" is not necessarily bad or wrong, and more importantly, that screaming that cliche on HN is very inconsistent.
- kevinpet 14y agoThat's a pretty whiny feature request. I read the first few dozen comments, and I don't really know what exactly was being requested. It's clear to me that the right approach is an extension specific to your preferred RSS reader. I understand that some browsers have an RSS reader built it, but that still doesn't make it a core feature that's going to be used by a big portion of their users.
- ernesth 14y agoThis feature request asks for two things to be native in chromium: 1. have an indicator in the browser interface that an rss feed is available for the current page. 2. have a preview of rss feeds rather than unstyled xml. It is just a matter of adding style for some xml files the way shiira[1] first did or the way safari[2], opera[3] or firefox do. It is clear to me that the second is nice for the user even if the chromium developpers do not intend to implement a full rss reader as it just consists in making some common web documents readable directly in the browser, it is far more logical for a web browser to display rss than to display pdf... The first point is said to distract the user and clutter the interface so I can understand why it should be an extension (firefox voluntarily suppressed this indicator a few years ago). [1]: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/reviews/large/shiira_002-large.jpg http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/reviews/large/shi... [2]: http://media.arstechnica.com/images/tiger/safari-rss-big.jpg http://media.arstechnica.com/images/tiger/safari-rss-big.jpg [3]: http://www.problogdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/windowslivewriter3e889e18f9a4-12c7aopera-rss-big-3.png http://www.problogdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/wind...
- tytso 14y agoI actually read RSS feeds --- using the Currents application (which is supported by Google and under active development; it's getting updates) on my Android Nexus 10 tablet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.currents&feature=nav_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDMsImNvbS5nb29nbGUuYW5kcm9pZC5hcHBzLmN1cnJlbnRzIl0 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and.... So for those people who claim that Google doesn't care at all about RSS, Currents is certainly a counter-example. And by the way, Google is a big enough company that to claim that a corporation as a whole as an opinion about any subject or any protocol is a little silly. Take for example, "IBM Loves Lotus Notes; therefore IBM must hate SMTP." Absurd. There is a part of IBM that make a lot of money off of Lotus Notes, yes. There are also lots of IBM engineers and former IBM engineers who hated it with a hot blazing passion. I'm aware of one IBM division which supplied its engineers with a Lotus Notes-free e-mail address because it was necessary for them to do their jobs. Specifically, interact with the open source community with a mail product that wouldn't destroy whitespace in patches....
- kmfrk 14y agoMaybe Larry Page should write a public statement entitled "Thoughts on RSS".
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI could be wrong but I'm not sure people would like the answer. If the reasoning is that Larry Page should write a statement to appease the tech intelligentsia; I'm afraid their actual motivations would be probably be more uncomfortable than the current situation. In other words, I don't think it is necessarily a long term statement about the technical viability of RSS (probably something more to do with protecting advertising revenue, but I don't know).
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoInteresting connection you made there. Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" was about moving away from proprietary tech towards open web standards. What Google is doing with RSS is the complete opposite.
- miles 14y ago"For a better user experience, we have migrated your feeds to a custom Google+ profile. We hope you will enjoy connecting with friends, family, and advertisers while reading news brought to you by Cuke(R)!"
- ihuman 14y agoDoes anyone know who pkasting@chromium.org is?
- dangrossman 14y agoPeter Kasting is the founding member of the Chrome team at Google.
- ihuman 14y agoI wasn't sure if the person that closed it was just some random guy, or a higher-up person at Google. Thanks for clearing this up.
- martindale 14y agoThe past 72 hours: Google Reader shutting down, Chrome's RSS extension removed from everyone's browser and the Chrome store, and "implement RSS natively" issue is now set to "wontfix". Way to be evil, Google. Also posted as a tweet, because fuck being evil: https://twitter.com/martindale/status/313148391624417280 https://twitter.com/martindale/status/313148391624417280
- bluebaby 14y agoThat's Chromium
- CyberDroiD 14y agoWow, I don't know about you, but this is amazing to watch. It's like Google is operating without a head. It's turned vicious and acting offensively against a specific technology. RSS will live on, of course. Amazing that Google is also so pompous.
- bbayer 14y agoGoogle next move: Remove Adsense for RSS. By the way Google Currents is doing good job as feed reader and it is relatively new product. I don't think Google has declared war to RSS. Since most of its APIs is based on Atom. May be they want to make a transition to JSON based standard.
- pootch 14y agoRSS like it or not is at its foundation a web-centric technology that enhances the ability of websites to push content, rather than have it be pull only. Whether the technology is flawed or not it has a place in the ecosystem of the web. And google cares not.