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.
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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @08:42PM
From those days of yore when the rallying cry was "f*ck beta", there was another contender for the slot that SN currently fills. Check out the "Feed" page on Pipedot.org -- I have one tab (in Firefox) open to my Feed page which is automatically populated by the headlines/subject lines from a bunch of RSS feeds.
Works great for me, I right-click>open_in_new-Tab on the headline if I'm interested in the article, otherwise I get nothing more. As far as I know, the owner of Pipedot is maintaining the site as a hobby and isn't accepting donations, although I would be happy to support him if he asked.