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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: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 15 2018, @01:01PM (2 children)
There sure has been an intense push to sell "RSS is dead" but I've had roughly the same 100 to 200 feeds since before Google Reader, and now I use Newsblur (and pay the premium, because its a good project). The numbers aren't dropping.
Maybe its categorical and its dying in the My Little Pony subculture, but it seems Astrobites and West Hunter and Zerohedge and Google's android dev blog and Daily WTF and all that are doing Just Fine.
Probably part of a big centralization into increased censorship general drive. And the general decline of clickbait and so forth, the days are long over of "I'm gonna be a millionaire because I'm a professional blogger".
... web browser, although my favorite feed systems have always had a web UI. Its like the difference between sendmail being an interesting MTA vs gmail being an interesting mail UI. I don't really want sendmail running in some perverted port of javascript on my browser, but gmail is "ok".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday October 15 2018, @03:04PM
You're reading way too much into this. Mozilla just doesn't want to keep it as a core feature when there's perfectly good extensions and third party software doing much same or better: https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=27198&page=1&cid=723788#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
IMHO, if Aaron Swartz [wikipedia.org] wasn't e-martyred back in 2013 they would have dumped support for it ages ago.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @07:42PM
Things haven't been the same since they put wings on Twilight Sparkle. *sigh*