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, Informative) by djh2400 on Monday October 15 2018, @09:32PM
After the chaos when Google Reader was shut down [slashdot.org], this was the one web-based RSS reader I found to deliver an experience most closely matching that of Google Reader (it's one of the layout settings). Also of import to me was/is that the free service doesn't impose a feed limit (I currently have 63 feeds, though I used to have more).
It's a free service, but they do have paid plans which offer a lot of interesting functionality that I don't need. It also has a lot of "sharing" stuff built in, but I have pretty much everything turned off except for the basic "reader" capabilities. The free account used to have ads (and probably still does), but it's nothing uBlock can't take care of. I've been using Inoreader's free service almost daily ever since Google Reader closed, and I find it to be even better than Reader ever was.