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SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Monday October 15 2018, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the switch-to-VR-news dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Protip from Mozilla (and Opera): If you hide a feature then you can say nobody uses it, and then remove it.

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

When Firefox 64 arrives in December, support for RSS, the once celebrated content syndication scheme, and its sibling, Atom, will be missing.

"After considering the maintenance, performance and security costs of the feed preview and subscription features in Firefox, we've concluded that it is no longer sustainable to keep feed support in the core of the product," said Gijs Kruitbosch, a software engineer who works on Firefox at Mozilla, in a blog post on Thursday.

RSS – which stands for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, as you see fit – is an XML-based format for publishing and subscribing to web content feeds. It dates back to 1999 and for a time was rather popular, but been disappearing from a variety of applications and services since then.

Mozilla appears to have gotten the wrecking ball rolling in 2011 when it removed the RSS button from Firefox. The explanation then was the same as it is now: It's just not very popular.

Among RSS/Atom fans, there's a more sinister explanation: feeds don't mesh well with the internet's data gathering industry because they allow users to consume web content (though usually not the full text of a site's articles) without triggering the dozens or even hundreds of analytics scripts lurking on web pages. Also, companies like Google and Facebook that have their own mechanisms for content aggregation have a disincentive to promote RSS/Atom apps as an alternative.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 15 2018, @11:30AM (3 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday October 15 2018, @11:30AM (#748966) Journal

    I never used RSS. Most things I don't want to automatically update. Not websites, not news feeds, not email, and definitely not OSes. It's one of my least favorite uses of JavaScript, the script that never stops running, as too well demonstrated by the green site. I also do not like text being pushed around to make room for new content when I'm trying to read something. Life is fast paced enough without such additional distractions.

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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by urza9814 on Monday October 15 2018, @04:47PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday October 15 2018, @04:47PM (#749124) Journal

    RSS *doesn't* update automatically. It's just the same content as the website, delivered through the same mechanisms, but in a more machine readable format. RSS is awesome precisely because it lets you ignore all of the Javascript and all of the auto-refresh and auto-movement and obnoxious stylesheets and all that other crap, and just get the raw content delivered so you can view it in any way that you like. For example, I currently have the Soylent RSS feed printing as my screensaver. Didn't need to build a screen scraper or HTML parser or any of that crap, not even a regex, just stuff the RSS feed URL into the Xscreensaver configuration and it just works. Maybe one line of bash if you want to make some minor formatting changes.

    The benefit of RSS isn't "automatic" updates; the benefit is that you only have to press F5 *once*, in your feed reader, instead of having to visit and refresh every single individual page that you want to check. And that you can easily script it and modify it however you want before viewing. In a way, RSS is exactly what HTML was supposed to be -- it just delivers the content, and lets your own device and your own preferences determine how to actually display it.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday October 15 2018, @07:01PM (1 child)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday October 15 2018, @07:01PM (#749178) Homepage

    It's one of my least favorite uses of JavaScript

    What has Javascript got to do with RSS?

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:07PM (#749274)

      the knucklehead said that he never used rss; how's he supposed to know that javascript and rss are unrelated?