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Firefox 64 Will Remove Support for RSS and Atom Feeds

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

upstart writes:

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: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Monday October 15 2018, @11:56AM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Monday October 15 2018, @11:56AM (#748973) Journal

    what if pale moon and waterfox and especially seamonkey keep the code as its maintenance is not as arduous, as the mozilla foundation, receiver of million dollars, depicts?

    there ought to be some rss reader implemented in javascript and local storage already, if there isn't one is a good project to undertake for getting some experience with web stuff IMHO.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 15 2018, @03:10PM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday October 15 2018, @03:10PM (#749083) Homepage Journal

    They probably will but anyone using RSS for news feeds in their browser (not for social bookmarks and such) is doing it wrong anyway. No browser has RSS functionality worth a damn compared to dedicated feed readers.

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    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @05:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @05:34PM (#749146)

      No browser has RSS functionality worth a damn compared to dedicated feed readers.

      Maybe no maintained browser. Presto-Opera did a fine job.