6 ms·

I 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 pla

I 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 ago
They 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 ago
I think that "blog post" was called Google+.
mdwrigh2 14y ago
This 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 ago
  Really? Strange timing then, don't you think?
  - mdwrigh2 14y ago
    No, 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 ago
      The bug was opened in 2010. It was changed to WontFix days after Google gave the Google Reader announcement. An unlikely coincidence.
      - arcatek 14y ago
        He 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 ago
        And 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).
        chc 14y ago
        If it can easily be an extension, why are the best replacements they could suggest so awful-looking?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- duskwuff 14y ago
  And it doesn't preclude the implementation of Chrome extensions which provide that functionality. It's merely a statement that it won't be integrated into the browser. (Which is fine by me. Chrome doesn't need to try to be everything to everybody. For that, there's the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite.)
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    Unfortunately Google also killed their RSS browser extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385089
    - magicalist 14y ago
      and the closing comment on this bug points to two new ones. I'm not sure why a bug no one cared about until today is getting people this riled up. I'm a loooong time Reader user and certainly never cared about RSS support in the browser (I used to use the RSS button in Firefox years ago, but that was honestly hit or miss on if it would enter the Reader workflow correctly, so I eventually just always searched for the URL in Reader directly). This story seems like people jumping at another chance to further shame google on the Reader front, which is fine, but this seems like a somewhat dishonest opening for it, especially considering the directness of the closing comment.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        Seems to me that quite a few people wanted it. This doesn't mean that it was wrong to close as WONTFIX, but people dd care about it.
- jimmaswell 14y ago
  Why not? A web browser's goal is to display web content, and RSS is web content.
  - adestefan 14y ago
    Browser implementations of nothing more than dynamic bookmark entries were worthless.
  - mdwrigh2 14y ago
    I would argue that "web browser" is a misnomer. I don't expect my browser to display IRC, Usenet, etc. etc. Besides, there's a lot of web content that requires plugins and extensions to view properly. I don't see why that can't be the case here.
    - shardling 14y ago
      "The web" has a specific meaning, and IRC and Usenet are not generally considered part of it. RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial vision for the web: >With help from Robert Cailliau, [Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_web)
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      IRC and Usenet aren't part of the web. Your definition is at issue here, not the actual definition in what the web is.
      - hollerith 14y ago
        Man, is it annoying when writers don't know the difference between the internet and the web. Maybe we could have a little test on the account-creation page?
- david_shaw 14y ago
  > It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways. Well, I can understand that it might not have been for everyone, but it was super convenient to be able to read RSS "folders" in Firefox. I'm a Chrome/Chromium fanboy these days--I use it on all of my devices--but I still miss that feature. If you don't want to use a certain functionality, it's easy to just avoid it; you can't ever use something that isn't implemented, though. Clicking on a bookmark and seeing the most recent BBC headlines, for example, was awesome.
  - mdwrigh2 14y ago
    I'm not convinced that it needs to be a part of Chrome however. Honestly, it sounds like a great use case for a Chrome extension.
  - randomPlusser 14y ago
    +1 why not just follow bbc on google+ now though?
    - VLM 14y ago
      Awful UI. Some people want a random subset of news for entertainment. G+ is great for that. Here's a great big pile of recent stuff from everyone, a circle, or a community. On the other hand, lets say I want to verify I read every story from certain sources (perhaps the BBC?) exactly, precisely once. I don't see a way in the G+ UI to "mark as read" or "only display unread" or whatever. Might exist or might be a weird way to hack it in, but its not intuitive. For some reason option #1 is semi-popular among news readers, social networking, and old fashioned or online broadcasting, but option #2 is nearly universal among email clients and podcast clients. You'd never use an email client with a UI of "here's a random collection of some recent emails" with no way to tag them as read or deleted. I'd LOL at the idea of a podcast client with "here's a random cast that you may or may not have already heard" Another horrible UI fail is time based. G+ can only do one linear "newest to oldest" sort. Even the dumbest RSS feed readers have some kind of tag/save/star feature. So you can skim the whole feed, star/save/tag good stuff for later detailed reading. Then once there is no "unread" left, start reading the star/save/tag stories in detail, perhaps much later. This "workflow" is impossible in G+ as near as I can tell. Finally no one using the "RSS" workflow uses G+, so you get the chicken and the egg thing, where there's no demand for even the most primitive of workflow management in G+ because anyone wanting anything like that uses RSS. So the BBC is a bad example in that their social networking people are probably required to use both, but I suspect that 99% of my RSS feeds are not available in G+ because they self segregate by workflow. You'll need a bigger shock to the system than cancelling goog reader. I switched to newsblur once the crushing demand let up a bit. I'm not going to abandon everything I currently enjoy to watch cat videos on G+.
- Yver 14y ago
  Most of the feeds I read are HTML excerpts with a link to the full article, or notifications with a link to a page. It makes perfect sense to read them within a browser, as I do in Opera.
  - mdwrigh2 14y ago
    Note that I didn't say you shouldn't read your RSS feeds in the browser, just that it isn't necessary for it to be part of the core browser itself. Extensions, web apps, etc. are all ways of reading RSS in the browser without it being directly incorporated.
- n09n 14y ago
  Not at all. Opera has a built-in RSS reader and it's very useful.
  - qw 14y ago
    I like that Opera handles feeds the same as email. Another alternative on Windows is surprisingly IE. The user interface is actually similar to GR where you can read multIple feeds at once when you organIze them In folders. I used it before I switched to GR. It can also import/export OPML
- Shorel 14y ago
  Opera has an RSS reader, and in the future it will be one based on webKit.
acdha 14y ago
That 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 ago
Dude 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 ago
  You 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 ago
What makes you think Google has any intention of replacing RSS? They're the new Microsoft. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  At least in the case of RSS, seems it was more like, Embrace, unembrace.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    Embrace, 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 ago
      The 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 ago
        The theirs in this case is Google+
        streptomycin 14y ago
        Damn Google+ and it's 98% market share for providing automatic notifications when a site updates its content! Wait, what?
andymoe 14y ago
Yeah, 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 :-)

zobzu 14y ago

They 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 ago

I think that "blog post" was called Google+.

mdwrigh2 14y ago

This 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 ago
Really? Strange timing then, don't you think?
- mdwrigh2 14y ago
  No, 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 ago
    The bug was opened in 2010. It was changed to WontFix days after Google gave the Google Reader announcement. An unlikely coincidence.
    - arcatek 14y ago
      He 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 ago
        And 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).
        chc 14y ago
        If it can easily be an extension, why are the best replacements they could suggest so awful-looking?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
duskwuff 14y ago
And it doesn't preclude the implementation of Chrome extensions which provide that functionality. It's merely a statement that it won't be integrated into the browser. (Which is fine by me. Chrome doesn't need to try to be everything to everybody. For that, there's the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite.)
- nitrogen 14y ago
  Unfortunately Google also killed their RSS browser extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385089
  - magicalist 14y ago
    and the closing comment on this bug points to two new ones. I'm not sure why a bug no one cared about until today is getting people this riled up. I'm a loooong time Reader user and certainly never cared about RSS support in the browser (I used to use the RSS button in Firefox years ago, but that was honestly hit or miss on if it would enter the Reader workflow correctly, so I eventually just always searched for the URL in Reader directly). This story seems like people jumping at another chance to further shame google on the Reader front, which is fine, but this seems like a somewhat dishonest opening for it, especially considering the directness of the closing comment.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      Seems to me that quite a few people wanted it. This doesn't mean that it was wrong to close as WONTFIX, but people dd care about it.
jimmaswell 14y ago
Why not? A web browser's goal is to display web content, and RSS is web content.
- adestefan 14y ago
  Browser implementations of nothing more than dynamic bookmark entries were worthless.
- mdwrigh2 14y ago
  I would argue that "web browser" is a misnomer. I don't expect my browser to display IRC, Usenet, etc. etc. Besides, there's a lot of web content that requires plugins and extensions to view properly. I don't see why that can't be the case here.
  - shardling 14y ago
    "The web" has a specific meaning, and IRC and Usenet are not generally considered part of it. RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial vision for the web: >With help from Robert Cailliau, [Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_web)
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    IRC and Usenet aren't part of the web. Your definition is at issue here, not the actual definition in what the web is.
    - hollerith 14y ago
      Man, is it annoying when writers don't know the difference between the internet and the web. Maybe we could have a little test on the account-creation page?
david_shaw 14y ago
> It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways. Well, I can understand that it might not have been for everyone, but it was super convenient to be able to read RSS "folders" in Firefox. I'm a Chrome/Chromium fanboy these days--I use it on all of my devices--but I still miss that feature. If you don't want to use a certain functionality, it's easy to just avoid it; you can't ever use something that isn't implemented, though. Clicking on a bookmark and seeing the most recent BBC headlines, for example, was awesome.
- mdwrigh2 14y ago
  I'm not convinced that it needs to be a part of Chrome however. Honestly, it sounds like a great use case for a Chrome extension.
- randomPlusser 14y ago
  +1 why not just follow bbc on google+ now though?
  - VLM 14y ago
    Awful UI. Some people want a random subset of news for entertainment. G+ is great for that. Here's a great big pile of recent stuff from everyone, a circle, or a community. On the other hand, lets say I want to verify I read every story from certain sources (perhaps the BBC?) exactly, precisely once. I don't see a way in the G+ UI to "mark as read" or "only display unread" or whatever. Might exist or might be a weird way to hack it in, but its not intuitive. For some reason option #1 is semi-popular among news readers, social networking, and old fashioned or online broadcasting, but option #2 is nearly universal among email clients and podcast clients. You'd never use an email client with a UI of "here's a random collection of some recent emails" with no way to tag them as read or deleted. I'd LOL at the idea of a podcast client with "here's a random cast that you may or may not have already heard" Another horrible UI fail is time based. G+ can only do one linear "newest to oldest" sort. Even the dumbest RSS feed readers have some kind of tag/save/star feature. So you can skim the whole feed, star/save/tag good stuff for later detailed reading. Then once there is no "unread" left, start reading the star/save/tag stories in detail, perhaps much later. This "workflow" is impossible in G+ as near as I can tell. Finally no one using the "RSS" workflow uses G+, so you get the chicken and the egg thing, where there's no demand for even the most primitive of workflow management in G+ because anyone wanting anything like that uses RSS. So the BBC is a bad example in that their social networking people are probably required to use both, but I suspect that 99% of my RSS feeds are not available in G+ because they self segregate by workflow. You'll need a bigger shock to the system than cancelling goog reader. I switched to newsblur once the crushing demand let up a bit. I'm not going to abandon everything I currently enjoy to watch cat videos on G+.
Yver 14y ago
Most of the feeds I read are HTML excerpts with a link to the full article, or notifications with a link to a page. It makes perfect sense to read them within a browser, as I do in Opera.
- mdwrigh2 14y ago
  Note that I didn't say you shouldn't read your RSS feeds in the browser, just that it isn't necessary for it to be part of the core browser itself. Extensions, web apps, etc. are all ways of reading RSS in the browser without it being directly incorporated.
n09n 14y ago
Not at all. Opera has a built-in RSS reader and it's very useful.
- qw 14y ago
  I like that Opera handles feeds the same as email. Another alternative on Windows is surprisingly IE. The user interface is actually similar to GR where you can read multIple feeds at once when you organIze them In folders. I used it before I switched to GR. It can also import/export OPML
Shorel 14y ago
Opera has an RSS reader, and in the future it will be one based on webKit.

acdha 14y ago

That 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 ago

Dude 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 ago
You 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 ago

What makes you think Google has any intention of replacing RSS? They're the new Microsoft. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

streptomycin 14y ago
At least in the case of RSS, seems it was more like, Embrace, unembrace.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Embrace, 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      The theirs in this case is Google+
      - streptomycin 14y ago
        Damn Google+ and it's 98% market share for providing automatic notifications when a site updates its content! Wait, what?

andymoe 14y ago

Yeah, 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 :-)