Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Monday October 15 2018, @12:23PM (1 child)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Monday October 15 2018, @12:23PM (#748986)

    ... ruining Firefox one release at a time.

    All I can say is, I still make use of RSS feeds, I love the fact I have a relatively clean way of getting data from a website that doesn't involve writing a scraper to do it for me (which gets quite tricky with modern JS based websites).

    I don't have to deal with ads and JS getting in the way, I can filter the feeds to only provide what I want, and I can even write scripts and bots to handle things based on triggers, as well as integrate the data into my own displays the way I wanted. The feeds were really lightweight (compared to modern bloated websites, that can pull in MB of data per page, all from god knows what third party domains with dodgy names).

    Was it perfect? No, in many ways RSS was a poor implementation, but it was a poor implementation of a good idea.

    In fact the original idea of HTML was to separate presentation and content, to allow end users to present the data as they wanted, but the trend has been in the opposite direction, where the content is so tightly bound to the presentation, you actually have to execute bytecode in a local VM to "render" the content with presentation, after which you can extract actual information.

    RSS became a fallback method when websites got bastardised into whatever the hell abomonation they are now, and I am sure there are people who will try very hard to prevent you accessing the content without their crap in the way, so I can understand why they don't provide RSS feeds.

    However, that is no reason to remove client support for it. Firefox in my eyes is already dead. Mozilla is just squeezing the corpse to get as much money out of the "brand recognition" as it can. Thank god we have forks like Pale Moon (which is what I have 100% switched over to) now.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @03:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @03:09PM (#749081)

    I have made better experience with Waterfox. Yes, it has a newer interface, but it supports the extensions to restore the old one.

    But still I care about Firefox because it's the browser I use at work.