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