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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @02:27AM (#749363)

    If entries get a datestamp and your rss reader keeps a list of the last datestamp checked, then you can easily filter results based on when the entries were last updated. As an added bonus, if entries are updated later and still in the feed you can get the fresh entries, plus the updated entries, for free. Make updates a second 'modified' string and you can even filter for only new articles.

    Look, it took all of 30 seconds for me to solve RSS's biggest complaint. The alternate client-side method is caching the old page and diffing for new entries.