I think I've come full circle on this...<p>(I was one of the creators of RSS).<p>My current company, Datastreamer:<p><a href="http://www.datastreamer.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datastreamer.io/</a><p>Provides social media data streams for companies and search engines wanting full torrents of web content.<p>We deprecated RSS a LONG time ago, which was for me, like abandoning your baby.<p>I think RSS is dead in many ways but it's also still around in a sense.<p>Mostly because of Twitter and Facebook metadata. You can accomplish 90% of what you want with RSS just by parsing the metadata on an HTML page.<p>Because we've added NLP and content extraction algorithms on top of the content we're able to re-construct feeds that are better than the original RSS.<p>With another app I'm working on:<p><a href="https://getpolarized.io/" rel="nofollow">https://getpolarized.io/</a><p>I might actually use something similar to build in data feeds similar to a feed reader.<p>But man.. I can't believe I'm thinking about building in a feed reader again :-P
I was perfectly fine with this right up until I clicked through to their support page, which pushes Pocket as an alternative. How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Get rid of RSS and link me to an extension when I open a feed, fine, but then stop shipping Pocket without giving me a way to uninstall it as well.
For everyone looking for an alternative, Brief is an excellent add-on and I've been using it for the last 2 years:<p>AMO: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/</a><p>GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/brief-rss/brief" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brief-rss/brief</a><p>It also includes a `Page action` so that an RSS icon is shown in the address bar on sites that support RSS/Atom. Great for discovery.<p>Edit: Really strange, that `Brief` is missing in the curated list of readers that mozilla is linking to from <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...</a> as alternative: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla/refined-reading/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla...</a> (This looks like a really poor list)
I've seen `Brief` recommended all the time by users. I don't really mind that Firefox removes its RSS support: It was missing many features anyway and had a really poor UX.
As much as I like RSS, one of the repeated pain points is that I'd like to actually <i>read</i> the content in my Feed Reader, but on many of the sites I pull from, the feeds only contain the article title and maybe half of the introductory sentence before dropping a link to the full article, which I then have to click and open in my browser.<p>To my mind, it kinda defeats the purpose of having the feed, since I could just as easily scroll the front page of the site.<p>Was it the <i>intention</i> of RSS from the outset that your feed would only provide a "preview" of the article, or was the hope that you would get the full body of the text?
I'm not okay with this. It is absolutely understandable that they want to remove the feed reader integrated into Firefox, that thing did not work well and I can understand that it was a lot of work. But the feed preview? If I understand correctly that's the proper display of the RSS/Atom feed itself when opened in Firefox, like <a href="https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg" rel="nofollow">https://www.pipes.digital/feed/14OE65qg</a>, which should be properly parsed in your browser. That's the absolute core a browser has to deliver: Rendering web content properly and not just to show the source code. If Firefox can't deliver that, what else does it want to deliver on?<p>And removing this feature - like the missing feed detection in the UI - is what indeed can kills RSS, as it makes RSS inaccessible to users. Unlike the feed reader itself this can not be solved by webextensions.
They say they're removing three things:<p>- the built-in feed preview feature<p>- the "live bookmarks" support<p>- the subscription UI<p>They give justifications for removing the first two, but not the third.<p>Assuming by "subscription UI" they mean the support for following a link to an RSS feed and being given the option to send the URL to my preferred online feed reader, I think that's a great shame.<p>Making it worse, that article says "that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons", with a link to what they say is a curated collection of readers, but none of the add-ons in that collection seem to replace the old subscription UI.
RSS support in FF was always poor, but that was often enough to preview a subscription. It didn't need to be more complicated than that.<p>On the other hand, or hay, Firefox Screenshots!! Sooo useful. Pocket? It doesn't get more federated than that! Or the dozen of DOM APIs added every year, which are probably much more complicated to maintain than a simple RSS preview feature.<p>I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed.
No one likes to see features removed from something. But this seems really reasonable given alternatives and current usage. Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products.<p>Another favorite quote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision." I'm betting this hurt (though a brief search through the FF mailing lists didn't turn up anything), but it seems like a good strategic decision.
Since this is the thread that took off for feature removal - I'll copy/paste a response I had in another thread that didn't foster more discussion.<p>I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 - my entire workflow has slowly been gutted over the years.<p>1) With FF 41 I could no longer set my New Tab page to my Home Page without an add-on. As of Firefox 57 the add-on became buggy if you regularly and quickly try to { Ctrl+T -> Ctrl+L -> Begin typing URL } due to limitations with the Web Extension API. [0]<p>2) Lost Tab Groups as of FF 45 (the add-on isn't a full replacement of old functionality)<p>3) Lost many, many, many addons with FF 57 including a very specific tab management that an addon called FireGestures allowed for: using a context menu to navigate my tabs.<p>4) Lost Bookmark descriptions with FF 62, also lost the Developer Toolbar<p>5) Now losing Live Bookmarks with FF 64<p>I no longer recommend FF as the "power user" browser but as the "I dislike Google and want a good browser that isn't Chrome" browser. If you're a power user of some uncommonly used feature, expect it to be removed at some point. I'd love to see how Pocket usage is measured and the statistics of how many people use that trash that they have shoved down users' throats since FF 38.<p>[0] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...</a>
They announced it months ago, in July: <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-remove-support-for-built-in-feed-reader-from-firefox/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-to-re...</a><p>Here's the direct link to the internal doc: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_NrJXupcMilTPFFVpmnI/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_...</a>
What a load of bullshit. Sure it's extra code, but browsers are ginormous anyway.<p>Removing Live Bookmarks is fine. But why get rid of the RSS auto-detection? It's a good advertisement for an immensely useful <i>open</i> technology.<p>Also... RSS is out and Pocket is in? Ironic.<p>I thought Mozilla was the one fighting for the open web? Well go fuck yourself Mozilla - that's what I'm feeling right now.
Personally I get my feed via mail (RSS2Email) because<p>- I can follow many site I like, instead of using an aggregator I do not own nor control;<p>- I can read posts/articles/listen podcasts without crappy webui full of advertisements;<p>- I can KEEP posts I'm interest in as long as I want, offline, indexed, tagged in my personal maildir taxonomy;<p>I still have to find an alternative for that. Usenet of course was a far better way to follow news, ask questions etc, but unfortunately people do not know it anymore... Any modern "feed reader"/"podcatcher" I found, except elfeed are crappy, buggy, unuseful ridiculous apps that try to mimic aggregators instead of focusing on contents.
This is truly sad because RSS clearly fulfills a need that Facebook/Twitter feeds never will.<p>Just last month I launched a bipartisan political news aggregator to force us out of our filter bubbles[1]. The only way I was able to do that was by consuming the politics RSS feeds for both right-leaning and left-leaning news websites.<p>Without RSS, it's much harder to build an aggregator like this.<p>1. <a href="https://smashthebubble.com/" rel="nofollow">https://smashthebubble.com/</a>
I think there's an inherent conflict with RSS and content providers today. Think about it, an RSS feed allows you to get content without dealing with advertising, tracking, etc. Most modern content sites would not support that sentiment.<p>Personally, I think RSS was one of the crowning achievements of the web. So much so that I attempted to make a little tool to 'create' RSS feeds out of websites that I want to track: <a href="http://diyrss.info/u/meesles" rel="nofollow">http://diyrss.info/u/meesles</a> (the view for a logged-in user shows when new content is available to read)<p>But again, this isn't sustainable. Any content site depending on revenue would rather users visit their site every 2 hours for content updates than use a third party like Feedly or DIYRSS. I think the solution lies in a fundamentally different revenue model for content, at least for smaller providers.
And this is why I'm so strongly against adding any more features to browsers such as WASM and new JavaScript language features and APIs: because browsers are already extremely complex programs that can't easily be created from scratch if FF decides to push their users around. I just hope all those armchair web devs who are only looking at their favourite programming language to become supported in browsers via WASM would consider how much they contribute to the death of the web by too many features. Those parties already in the game - browser vendors and self-acclaimed standard bodies - don't have an incentive to simplify the web stack, and will never be able to step back and say "the web is done" after 25 years of attempting to shoehorn a document viewer into an application platform.
I actually built my own extension for Chrome back in the day when I wanted to switch from Firefox to Chrome. It was modeled after Firefox Live Bookmarks. We've now come full circle and implemented an addon for Firefox: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feeder/</a>
I have always used RSS. After Google shutdown their Reader, I switched to InoReader. It's a tad slow but much better than alternatives (e.g. Feedly). The reason I prefer RSS is that I need to keep track of a lot of blogs and sites on topics of my interest, and with a feed reader I can "star" them, mark them as unread, search across them (yes!), and group them into sections so that I can process them more efficiently.<p>Some of us just want more control without flashiness, in an organized but flexible way, in how we consume content, and RSS + a good reader is perfect for it.
For me, RSS is by far the best way to access web content.<p>I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it.<p>One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.<p>Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of.<p>If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).<p>[1] <a href="https://freshrss.org/" rel="nofollow">https://freshrss.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge</a>
Here's a repo I set up with 23 US newspapers, OPML format so you can import it into your own RSS reader.<p><a href="https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml</a>
Does anyone know a good way to view RSS in Safari? I'm tired of getting "Safari cannot handle..." errors when debugging RSS. Even if I can just view the code, I'd live with that.
I'm conflicted.<p>Moving RSS/Atom into webextensions is probably the right decision if you want a small, focused browser that does what it does well and that allows the community to innovate on top of it. And I want that.<p>So I should be happy, but Firefox overall doesn't seem to necessarily be moving in that direction. Like, I still don't really get why we have Pocket integration. So now I don't know.<p>It's a good decision that's maybe being made for the wrong reasons, and that may have bad side effects.
I already searched feeds up in my feed reader, but only because the existing Firefox feature was poorly-integrated. I never could figure out how to have it redirect feeds to a reader. I wanted something like the way you can add search engines, but for third-party RSS readers.<p>The feature as it was didn't work very well, and they obviously weren't going to improve it. So maybe it's for the best that they remove it.
It sounds like a sad thing as RSS/Atom is a great thing that I would love to see regaining its popularity but in fact "RSS/Atom support" in browsers always seemed useless to me. Using the default browser facilities to read feeds felt like using Notepad to write code. There always are much better feed readers available.
If your use case for RSS/Atom feeds is to read mainstream news, my startup <a href="https://distilpost.com" rel="nofollow">https://distilpost.com</a> can fill in very well. News aggregated from over 1k sources as well as from tweets and instagram posts and categorized both by region and subject matter.
interesting - I just got a notification from Dropbox<p>"On Dec 14, 2018, we're saying goodbye to the events RSS feed. We think some of your team members may have used this feed.<p>We're focused on building better tools for viewing and monitoring activity, for admins and users alike. Here are some other ways you can see what's happening in Dropbox"<p>I don't see any relation, but could any factor have influenced the timing of these announcements? Or is it just a coincidence that two large co's drop RSS within hours of each other.
I feel, this may be more about Mozilla trying to get rid of XML at all.<p>Because, why would something simple as RSS be a burden to maintain? The code has been written (!), the format well understood, the years gone should have ironed out the bugs, so what could be the problem?<p>The only difficult thing to maintain may be an XML parser, but that is also there since the Netscape days and, for RSS, you don't need current XML technologies (XPath 2+), you are fine with XPath1.
When Google sunset Reader I was lost as that's the one and only way I access content on the Internet. I found my solution in inoreader.com which is close enough that I don't miss it. I can even login via Google SSO.<p>But it costs some $$$ but it's a great service and worth it IMO.<p>FWIW, I only want to see RSS feeds in a browser from any device I have and not have to own the RSS backend myself, so my method works for me.
Why are these announcements on such a strange domain, wouldn’t an official domain be more appropriate for this type of news?<p>Looks like a random personal blog site, I looked around first but currently still have no idea what this site is otherwise for.
I heavily use both Firefox and RSS — with FeedHQ — but I've never used any of Firefox's RSS features (except the feed preview, but only incidentally, and it's nothing I'll miss.)
With Firefox removing RSS, I think that's the final nail in the coffin for it. There is nothing left of what Firefox was, it's now just a hollow shell and a name that means nothing.
I like RSS very much and use it everywhere I can, but for me the live bookmark feature in Firefox kinda sucked. I use other readers like e.g. Thunderbird.
People have been bitching about Chrome too, and those things they were bitching about can also be disabled using flags. Turns out Google and the Mozilla Corporation are not so different after all!