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Protip from Mozilla (and Opera): If you hide a feature then you can say nobody uses it, and then remove it.
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.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday October 15 2018, @11:38AM (2 children)
There's also the fact that RSS was, generally speaking, built a really dumb way. Typically, you got however many articles were placed in the feed by the website. They put 20 in and you've already seen 18 of them? Too bad, you still get all 20. Haven't checked that feed in a while, missed 100 articles, and the feed only contains 15? Too bad, you only get the most recent 15. The first part of this got worked around by having RSS clients keep track of canonical URLs for stories that had been seen previously so that they weren't redisplayed to the user; but to my knowledge there was never a good RSS based solution to second part.
Sure, this could be worked around, somewhat, by passing parameters in the request that returned the RSS data - but this wasn't part of the spec, when IMO it should have been from the very start.
Anyway, that's my not-particularly-relevant-to-the-current-topic rant on the Reason that $TECHNOLOGY_UNDER_DISCUSSION is poorly designed for today.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @04:15PM (1 child)
Yet nobody has offered an actual better version of it.
The alternatives are:
Getting email alerts (generates a huge pile of emails)
Checking on each site individually (tedious for anything that doesn't have a fixed update schedule)
Giving in and subscribing to the new school content aggregators like twitter and youtube. Not only do you have to pull the whole site instead of just the content, you can't even have it all on one platform since there's no guarantee what you check on has an account on all social networks, so you end up having to check multiple feeds anyway. Not to mention how those feeds are even father away from being exhaustive as RSS is, with content being throttled, updates not being shown or unwanted content injected in your feed.
And it's sad the way it's dying because it can work by itself with minimal effort. Most sites built by tool have rss feeds in them even when the page doesn't show an icon for it, you can find it in the page code. The publication format in a lot of modern sites like youtube or twitter that have removed native RSS support is very easy to parse and the claimed "maintenance problems" are imaginary. Hell, feed readers that have been out of development for years still do their job perfectly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:27AM
If entries get a datestamp and your rss reader keeps a list of the last datestamp checked, then you can easily filter results based on when the entries were last updated. As an added bonus, if entries are updated later and still in the feed you can get the fresh entries, plus the updated entries, for free. Make updates a second 'modified' string and you can even filter for only new articles.
Look, it took all of 30 seconds for me to solve RSS's biggest complaint. The alternate client-side method is caching the old page and diffing for new entries.