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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

Related Stories

Mozilla Was "Outfoxed" by Google 53 comments

Mozilla "Got Outfoxed" by Google – Former VP Accuses Google for Sabotaging Firefox

Former Mozilla VP, Johnathan Nightingale, has called out on Google for what could only be termed as anti-competitive practices. In a Twitter thread on a somewhat unrelated subject, Nightingale said that during his 8 years at Mozilla, Google was the company's biggest partner. "Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income," he tweeted.

However, that doesn't mean Google wasn't involved in some underhand practices. "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans," Nightingale wrote. "When chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn't cut ties, break our search deal – nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, 'We're on the same side. We want the same things.'"

"I think our friends inside google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other. But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers," Nightingale added.

Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible."

All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say "hey what gives?"

And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks."

Usage share of web browsers.

Previously: After 10 Years with Google, Firefox Switches to Yahoo
Netmarketshare Claims Mozilla Firefox Usage Drops Below Ten Percent
Mozilla CEO Warns Microsoft's Switch to Chromium Will Give More Control of the Web to Google
Is Google Using an "Embrace, Extend..." Strategy?
Google Denies Altering YouTube Code to Break Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Employee Sparks Outrage by Suggesting Firefox Switch Browser Engine to Chromium

Related: Firefox 29 is a Flop; UI Design Trends Only Getting Worse
Mozilla Teases Chromium-Based Firefox, Then Pulls Back
Can the New Firefox Quantum Regain its Web Browser Market Share?
Firefox 64 Will Remove Support for RSS and Atom Feeds
Microsoft Reportedly Building a Chromium-Based Web Browser to Replace Edge, and "Windows Lite" OS


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday October 15 2018, @11:14AM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday October 15 2018, @11:14AM (#748958) Homepage Journal

    "feeds...allow users to consume web content...without triggering the dozens or even hundreds of analytics scripts lurking on web pages"

    Also, without seeing ads, or auto-playing videos, or any other crap.

    These are the real reasons that RSS is dying. I still have maybe half-a-dozen websites I read via RSS, but every year another one becomes unavailable.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday October 15 2018, @09:34PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Monday October 15 2018, @09:34PM (#749232)

      Thats the entire problem. RSS is not tied to a single powerful centralized company like Twitter. So of course it has to go in the shitcan to appease the corporate overlords.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 15 2018, @11:30AM (3 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday October 15 2018, @11:30AM (#748966) Journal

    I never used RSS. Most things I don't want to automatically update. Not websites, not news feeds, not email, and definitely not OSes. It's one of my least favorite uses of JavaScript, the script that never stops running, as too well demonstrated by the green site. I also do not like text being pushed around to make room for new content when I'm trying to read something. Life is fast paced enough without such additional distractions.

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by urza9814 on Monday October 15 2018, @04:47PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Monday October 15 2018, @04:47PM (#749124) Journal

      RSS *doesn't* update automatically. It's just the same content as the website, delivered through the same mechanisms, but in a more machine readable format. RSS is awesome precisely because it lets you ignore all of the Javascript and all of the auto-refresh and auto-movement and obnoxious stylesheets and all that other crap, and just get the raw content delivered so you can view it in any way that you like. For example, I currently have the Soylent RSS feed printing as my screensaver. Didn't need to build a screen scraper or HTML parser or any of that crap, not even a regex, just stuff the RSS feed URL into the Xscreensaver configuration and it just works. Maybe one line of bash if you want to make some minor formatting changes.

      The benefit of RSS isn't "automatic" updates; the benefit is that you only have to press F5 *once*, in your feed reader, instead of having to visit and refresh every single individual page that you want to check. And that you can easily script it and modify it however you want before viewing. In a way, RSS is exactly what HTML was supposed to be -- it just delivers the content, and lets your own device and your own preferences determine how to actually display it.

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday October 15 2018, @07:01PM (1 child)

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday October 15 2018, @07:01PM (#749178) Homepage

      It's one of my least favorite uses of JavaScript

      What has Javascript got to do with RSS?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:07PM (#749274)

        the knucklehead said that he never used rss; how's he supposed to know that javascript and rss are unrelated?

  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday October 15 2018, @11:38AM (2 children)

    by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Monday October 15 2018, @11:38AM (#748968) Journal

    There's also the fact that RSS was, generally speaking, built a really dumb way. Typically, you got however many articles were placed in the feed by the website. They put 20 in and you've already seen 18 of them? Too bad, you still get all 20. Haven't checked that feed in a while, missed 100 articles, and the feed only contains 15? Too bad, you only get the most recent 15. The first part of this got worked around by having RSS clients keep track of canonical URLs for stories that had been seen previously so that they weren't redisplayed to the user; but to my knowledge there was never a good RSS based solution to second part.

    Sure, this could be worked around, somewhat, by passing parameters in the request that returned the RSS data - but this wasn't part of the spec, when IMO it should have been from the very start.

    Anyway, that's my not-particularly-relevant-to-the-current-topic rant on the Reason that $TECHNOLOGY_UNDER_DISCUSSION is poorly designed for today.

    --
    Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @04:15PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @04:15PM (#749109)

      Yet nobody has offered an actual better version of it.
      The alternatives are:
      Getting email alerts (generates a huge pile of emails)
      Checking on each site individually (tedious for anything that doesn't have a fixed update schedule)
      Giving in and subscribing to the new school content aggregators like twitter and youtube. Not only do you have to pull the whole site instead of just the content, you can't even have it all on one platform since there's no guarantee what you check on has an account on all social networks, so you end up having to check multiple feeds anyway. Not to mention how those feeds are even father away from being exhaustive as RSS is, with content being throttled, updates not being shown or unwanted content injected in your feed.

      And it's sad the way it's dying because it can work by itself with minimal effort. Most sites built by tool have rss feeds in them even when the page doesn't show an icon for it, you can find it in the page code. The publication format in a lot of modern sites like youtube or twitter that have removed native RSS support is very easy to parse and the claimed "maintenance problems" are imaginary. Hell, feed readers that have been out of development for years still do their job perfectly.

      • (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.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Monday October 15 2018, @11:56AM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Monday October 15 2018, @11:56AM (#748973) Journal

    what if pale moon and waterfox and especially seamonkey keep the code as its maintenance is not as arduous, as the mozilla foundation, receiver of million dollars, depicts?

    there ought to be some rss reader implemented in javascript and local storage already, if there isn't one is a good project to undertake for getting some experience with web stuff IMHO.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 15 2018, @03:10PM (1 child)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday October 15 2018, @03:10PM (#749083) Homepage Journal

      They probably will but anyone using RSS for news feeds in their browser (not for social bookmarks and such) is doing it wrong anyway. No browser has RSS functionality worth a damn compared to dedicated feed readers.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @05:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @05:34PM (#749146)

        No browser has RSS functionality worth a damn compared to dedicated feed readers.

        Maybe no maintained browser. Presto-Opera did a fine job.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @12:14PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @12:14PM (#748981)

    What's really needed is an RSS 2.0 spec.
    First off, ditch the XML, it's not needed, JSON can do the job and can it in literally half the number of bytes.

    Secondly, there needs to be a "days of" mechanism, allowing you to fetch the feed for a group of days, even if that's 1 day at a time.
    Example if you haven't checked the feed in a week, let it fetch the current day and then keep feeding in the background the previous days.

    Something like this has a huge advantage over something goofy like RSS or AMP.
    If we could find a way to make it into a standard.

    If folks are worried about losing advertising revenue, I wouldn't even mind if they injected an ad or two into the feed, as long as it's plain text with a simple single image no fancy effects or video honestly would you?

    What do you guys say we work this spec out and get proof of concept going?
    All it would take is a wordpress plugin and a chrome extension to snap up 90% of the market for this sort of thing.

    • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @12:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @12:40PM (#748989)

      > change XML to JSON

      As far as RSS is concerned XML and JSON are the same sort of shit. Useless change with no gain.

    • (Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday October 15 2018, @01:16PM (1 child)

      by aiwarrior (1812) on Monday October 15 2018, @01:16PM (#749000) Journal

      Hey I still use rss feeds even from Soylent.
      Do you know anybody willing to go through the RFC hoops and can program a wordpress plugin. Maybe start a tip jar?
      Do you have an idea for a budget?

    • (Score: 2) by Kalas on Thursday October 18 2018, @12:40AM

      by Kalas (4247) on Thursday October 18 2018, @12:40AM (#750240)

      Regarding text ads, yes that would be a perfectly acceptable compromise for most people.
      The problem is that advertisers have shown time and again that, in any and every medium, they will ALWAYS work their way up to more and more intrusive ads. The paid television industry is a prime example of that, going from no ads inserted between shows at first to fully 1/3rd of airtime being ads on almost all channels.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by aim on Monday October 15 2018, @12:21PM

    by aim (6322) on Monday October 15 2018, @12:21PM (#748984)

    IMHO, this is a feature that doesn't belong locally in the browser anyway. I use multiple devices on a regular basis, and would be annoyed if I got to see every news item from every feed on all of them, if I already checked them elsewhere.

    That's why I use my own TinyRSS instance on my own webserver - I access it from anywhere, and get to see all my feeds/items exactly once. Be it from my laptop, work PC, phone, tablet or whatnot, whatever the webbrowser happens to be. I get all the goodies from RSS, no bulls**t.

  • (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.

    • (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.

  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday October 15 2018, @12:32PM (6 children)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday October 15 2018, @12:32PM (#748988) Homepage Journal

    I used to use a web based RSS, I can't remember what it was. Anyone here use one, if so what's a good one?

    --
    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @12:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @12:46PM (#748990)

      Tiny Tiny RSS - install on your linux server and access from a web browser - best thing out there.

      https://tt-rss.org/ [tt-rss.org]

      I use it to browse about 200 different sites with RSS every day. I couldn't function without RSS.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @01:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @01:34PM (#749012)

      I literally came here from inoreader.com, which is how I read news from lots of sites, including this one. Has a web client and an android app.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by EvilSS on Monday October 15 2018, @02:54PM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 15 2018, @02:54PM (#749070)
      I use ustart.org, although it's more of a replacement for iGoogle than a strict RSS reader style app.
    • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday October 15 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)

      by bart9h (767) on Monday October 15 2018, @07:05PM (#749179)

      I'm using Feedly since Google killed Reader.

      But that's only because I'm too lazy to install TinyRSS.
      Someday...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @09:31PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @09:31PM (#749669)

        If you use your phone for RSS and your computer as well, I can HIGHLY recommend TT-RSS; after the initial setup it's quite painless, and it's really not bad to get up in the first place if you've ever thrown up a LAMP stack. Heck, you can probably even find a docker image to use, such as this one [docker.com] to do it even more painlessly.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by djh2400 on Monday October 15 2018, @09:32PM

      by djh2400 (725) on Monday October 15 2018, @09:32PM (#749230)
      For a web-based RSS reader, I regularly use and certainly recommend Inoreader [inoreader.com].

      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.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 15 2018, @01:01PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 15 2018, @01:01PM (#748995)

    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".

    Among RSS/Atom fans, there's a more sinister explanation: feeds don't mesh well with the ...

    ... 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

      by RamiK (1813) on Monday October 15 2018, @03:04PM (#749079)

      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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @07:42PM (#749195)

      Maybe its categorical and its dying in the My Little Pony subculture

      Things haven't been the same since they put wings on Twilight Sparkle. *sigh*

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Monday October 15 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday October 15 2018, @05:01PM (#749133) Journal

    Can someone clarify exactly what is being removed here?

    It sounds like it's a full RSS feed reader...which I didn't even know Firefox had, so if that's all it is, I don't particularly care. Get a real feed reader.

    On the other hand, I *do* regularly view RSS feeds in Firefox. If you just load a feed URL, it gives you a very nicely formatted output which lets you actually see what's in there before you go adding it to your feed reader or whatever else. If they ditch that, I'm gonna be **PISSED**.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:51PM (#749564)

      Years ago, firefox had a "subscribe" option that would allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed as a "live bookmark" (I believe they were called). The few I ever used showed up on the bookmark toolbar, and you'd click it to open a dropdown menu showing the latest feeds from that RSS feed. IIRC it didn't handle keeping track of what was already read, just showed the latest articles.

      I say the few I ever used not because I stopped using RSS, but simply because it really was never the best way to access feeds in the first place, myself instead preferring a TT-RSS configuration with Newsboat on my command line and the TT-RSS android client on my phone, allowing 3 ways to access the same database and thus not being shown the same feeds again simply because I'm reading on another device.

      But yes, basically it was a "full" RSS client...just not a very good one. It's also been hidden away for quite some time.

  • (Score: 1) by magamo on Monday October 15 2018, @06:34PM (1 child)

    by magamo (3037) on Monday October 15 2018, @06:34PM (#749171)

    So sad, as this IS my method of consuming SoylentNews, and a few other sites.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:58PM (#749242)

      Consider setting up the RSS feed from SN to go to a "Feed" page on Pipedot.org (see another post about Pipedot nearby.)

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @08:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @08:42PM (#749215)

    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.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @10:18PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @10:18PM (#749254)

    To those claiming killing RSS because advertisment and control/centralization, another proof you aren't wrong, Mozilla pushes their own Pocket as replacement.

    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox [mozilla.org]

    Other alternatives
    Content discovery and styling

    Mozilla is working on various initiatives that provide similar functionality to RSS/Atom feed support, like Pocket (for aiding content discovery and selection by users) and Reader Mode (for features like voice support and user-controlled styling of content).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @05:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @05:02AM (#749406)

      MOAR POCKET MOAR MOAR MOAR!!!

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:12PM (#749278)

    Here's another example of things going downhill after the pink-hair CoC crowd took over at Mozilla. Instead of spending R&D on improving RSS, they spend the money on special bathrooms for this week's newly discovered gender.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:46PM (#749639)

    i've never used rss and if mozilla is wasting a bunch of time on it, then dropping it is fine by *me*. what pisses me off is that FF and chromium don't support rtsp video streams after a decade or so of security cams using it to stream their video. it's absurd how much BS you have to go through to *try* and watch your cams in the browser (if you don't want to use flash for rtmp or closed nvr/guis from the cam companies. i use ffplay in the terminal, but that won't work for relatives/clients) when it would probably be easy for them to support rtsp. its mp4 in a simple protocol. the html5 video tag supports mp4. what's the big goddamned deal?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @07:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @07:04PM (#750086)

      Write a browser extension or hire somebody to do it for you.

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