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 …
Gecko died a few versions back and was replaced by Quantum/Electron wasn't it?
Never bothered with live bookmarks but a preview of the feed is easy to do and the libraries for parsing RSS are pretty robust and safe. I guess, if they're talking about podcasts, the problems will be with any kind of embedded media / HTML.
it would have been LESS difficult if they hadn't wasted time and effort doing the following:
a) Australis
b) a 'UWP' version (DOA last I heard)
c) hamburger menu re-invention
Mozilla: why not just give us what WE WANT instead of what YOU want us to have?
You're not Micro-shaft. Please don't act like them.
Mozilla: why not just give us what WE WANT instead of what YOU want us to have?
I agree with the sentiment but by that logic you still wouldn't be getting a new RSS reader. If nobody uses a feature, Mozilla has to assume nobody wants said feature.
Totally agree, and on a lighter note, after recently having extended troubles with Quantum, I discovered Waterfox, a branch of Firefox that got out of there before Quantum swallowed up the whole ecosystem.
I do have one Linux machine running the latest Quantum as a reference point but everything else either runs pre-Quantum ESD or Waterfox. Sod Mozilla if this is their attitude right now - as bad as Microsnot.
For me It's Innoreader (inoreader.com) which gets me to El Register pages, along with about 30 other feeds. I want just the headlines, ma'am, and then an abstract (if available), and then the full article.
As this article says, this subverts all the tracking bits scattered throughout our meals - just like I want it to.
Another RSS El Reg reader here - I have quite a few "live bookmarks" and have never read RSS any other way; looked at a few readers a while back but just didn't see the point - "live bookmarks" work just fine and Feed Sidebar lights up a button whenever there's something to read and lists the titles nicely by site on the left. I guess Mozilla just really, REALLY wants to make sure I never even consider using their latest crap.
What I don't understand is, if they think RSS is obsolete - what are they proposing instead? How are you supposed to be notified that a site you haven't been to for two years sprung back to life and emitted a new post...? And FYI I mean some way other than a Facebook feed whatever that might be because fuck Facebook sideways.
Threlkeld - I use a FF add-on called "Brief". It's feature-lite and can be a bit buggy (needs removing and re-loading every few months for some reason), but it's the best RSS reader for Firefox that I've found. No good if you want something that synchs across devices.
I tend to use RSS on my phone... light toilet entertainment, so to speak! Yes, I do wash my hands, Yes I do wash the phone screen!
But my go apps are:
Inoreader - for list management and online reading (Avoid the mess of managing multiple locations)
News+ On Android - Works with Inoreader
Reeder On Mac - This is recent for me
I recommend https://feedly.com. Content is synchonized across all devices. You can import and export OPML when migrating from/to other readers.
RSS is like cleaning materials that are cheap basic chemicals. People don't know about them because it wouldn't pay to advertise, and in the end the cheap product becomes hard to find because there's 'no demand.'
I used to use RSS and really liked it. For me it was the only way to keep up with a very large number of sites without wasting lots of time. Then several readers stopped working for one reason or another ("upgrades") and every time I had to change reader it was to a worse one and I lost all my bookmarks. In the end I gave up, but I still miss it.
Of course sites have also been removing their RSS feeds, or making them hard to find. There is no large-scale future because If it did become popular, advertisers would surely make it a condition that feeds were removed.
@Tony W
I think your 50% right, this is exactly what happened to Dilbert, because RSS readers where simply hot-linking to the cartoon strip, they stopped it, I suspect it was due to the artist(s) was getting no traffic.
But where I think you're wrong, is where sites publish articles, they only provide a snippet in the RSS feed, which entices visitors to the page, such as El Reg does. Also, I subscribe to feed that aggregate information and articles on particular subjects from lots of smaller sites, without RSS these smaller sites probably wouldn't get very much traffic at all - So it does still have a lot of relevance.
It wouldn't suprise me if somebody come up with a slight twist to RSS and tried to commercialise it (Like Slack did with IRC!)
> It wouldn't suprise me if somebody come up with a slight twist to RSS and tried to commercialise it (Like Slack did with IRC!)
They did. It's called Twitter. You're supposed to "follow" the people/organisations you're interested in and have them spam the same link 50 times a day to drown out all the others you're following.
"Kruitbosch says, for example, that live bookmarks don't work properly with podcasts, don't sync, don't register whether an article has been read"
It shows on my FF live bookmarks which articles i have read so Kruitbosch is clearly not correct about that.
It is a shame they are going to remove this function as I actually use The Register and BBC news feeds as a live bookmark on my FF toolbar, so I can see if there are any articles that take my interest without needing to leave the tab i have open.
It smells a bit fishing to me that they want to remove RSS when FF has tie in with the Pocket app, I wonder if they got some commercial pressure from that to remove RSS and then they can try to promote Pocket more.
>> feeds don't mesh well with the internet's data gathering industry
is, I suspect, the real reason for the removal from browsers.
Pretty much. Sites don't advertise feeds much. If they exist at all it's a tine link buried in the small text at the bottom.
If sites don't provide an attractive feed and it's not easier or as easy to use as other aggregates like Facebook, of course the browsers are going to drop the code.
I suspect most people don't want to read more than a paragraph and expect a video instead.
I've Newsbeuter with feeds from all regularly visited sites set up, but they've gotten so few and far between it's just easier to go direct, and most articles link to the real site anyway these days.
I use feedly.com now and am pretty happy with it.
It seems to me that The Reg used to supply RSS links to individual authors. I used to use it to keep up with new postings by Alistair Dabbs, but I haven't been able to find an alternative for a long time. Perhaps someone can tell me if there is a way to do this that I am just missing.
I like RSS a lot and have been annoyed at its gradual demise.
RSS is still the best way to consume day-by-day data on the 'net. For a site like El Reg, we get the executive summary, then click on selected stories we want to read. I don't think I'd hang around here if there were no feed. Ditto other news sites. And all the blogs I follow are through RSS or Atom feeds, either directly or aggregated as Planets (which I follow using a Planet's feed).
The web browser does nicely for sites one visits proactively but not daily, and for interactive contents. Mailinglists serve for full two-way communication, with a much higher bar to subscription than a feed. Usenet does (or did) interactive comms best of all. RSS serves a niche that is none of those.
Fortunately these media still integrate: the RSS button in a webpage, and the feed reader launching a full Reg story in a browser. No need for Firefox's builtin stuff, which was always less-than optimal.
My phpBB board has an Atom feed, that I read on Fossamail. I can monitor posts without having to keep refreshing the browser. A favorite site of mine, American Bird Conservancy, switched from RSS to Twitter. I don't see their updates anymore. I miss the days when everything online didn't have to be monetized.
RSS is a really simple format that is easy to code, several orders of magnitude simpler than html, javascript, css, etc. I find it really worrying that a spokesperson from Mozilla would describe it as difficult to maintain or bring up to modern coding standards. Either Mozilla have lost all their skilled programmers or he's lying.
If major browsers have a feature, then it's an entry point for newcomers and novices to the web. If major browsers don't carry RSS, how are people going to get to know of its existence?
I have just got back into RSS after a long time away, and now I hear about this. It's very disheartening. This is an empowering, disintermediating technology, that puts the user in control, and at the centre of the world of their interests. However I can see that this would mean that there it would be of limited interest for the modern, business-oriented world wide web in which the user signs up to a Faustian pact in which they trade convenience for their digital souls. This abandonment of RSS comes at a time when the need for this kind of disintermediation is more needed than ever before.
Anyway - I will use Live Links till they disappear, and I have Newsboat waiting to take over in my bash shell.
Like everyone else, RSS brought me here!
Since Google killed off Reader I've been running my own ttrss instance and it's great. Does exactly what I need. Might be a good option if you're one of those people who likes spending their spare time running their own sh1t and work time running other peoples'.
I could be wrong, but I believe Thunderbird 60 now has improved RSS handling... or something. (googles).
Okay, there's mention of Thunderbird and RSS here[1], but absolutely no mention of it in Mozilla's own "What's new in Thunderbird 60"[2] blog post. So not much love from Mozilla. :(
On a separate note, can I no longer include HTML links in el-Reg comments?!!
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/thunderbird-60-release-features
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2018/08/whats-new-in-thunderbird-60/
I use Thunderbird for RSS for many years; I lost the count. I love it that it treats each item as a message that can be marked read (or not), tag it, star it, filter it, etc. I use it for about 50 feeds: news feeds, software release information, status logs from providers, etc
RSS was improved in Thunderbird 60: you can now tune the update interval for each feed, which is cool: status updates from providers every few minutes, some feeds every few days, etc. It is mentioned as "* NEW Individual feed update interval" on this page:
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releasenotes/
AFAIK only Bronze badge commentards can do HTML in their posts since those were introduced. < a> tags work fine for me anyways
"The feed viewer has its own 'special' XML parser, distinct from the main Firefox one, and has not had a significant update in styling or functionality in the last seven years"
It's an RSS feed, it works fine and there is no need for updating the styling.
As for functionality, bloody hell why is it that everything has to get more functionality ? When it works, it's good enough - leave it alone. Adding more functionality is called feature creep and is a sickness that has killed many a product's usefullness. You don't add functionality for the sake of adding it, you add the functionality you need and you stop when you have what you need.
Somebody get a cluebat, I feel the need for some percussive education.
Is all you need. Nice Android app too. https://tt-rss.org/
Don't rely on some outside company, stick it on your server and rest easy. Some Web hosts even have autoinstallers.
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I've always used standalone readers; I don't even know what the built-in reader looks like in FF. RSS is the awesome (or Atom, sure, I don't care, it's a protocol.)
At this point, RSS is the only way I can really handle El Reg, as it's just too much effort to scan through the news now that it is algorithmically sorted in order of... I honestly have no idea how the editors decide what I will be interested in but it's hit-and-miss and I now really can't be bothered to read past the top headlines on the official web site.
Over the last year, I've fallen out of love with Firefox: Ever since they launched Quantum with an incomplete API set so a whole subset of simple extensions (coincidentally, all the ones I use) just can't be made.
It's been one year since the code switch, and toolbars are still on the "TBD" List
Then they pulled that little Mr. Robot stunt.
Then they scooped up testers DNS Results
Then they caved to Symantec on the certificate removal
All the while removing every USP (Customisation, Add-Ons, Privacy) their browser has, and turning it into a Knock-off version of Chrome.
At this point, a mix of Chrome and Edge provide a much more stable, pleasant web experience; After 14 years of use, time to say a not so fond farewell to Firefox.
it's a classic piece of bullshit, like with banks: we're closing branches, because they're much less popular, people prefer to bank online. Well, they are less popular, because you FUCKERS CLOSED A LOT OF BRANCHES TO FORCE PEOPLE TO BANK ONLINE IN ORDER TO REDUCE YOUR COSTS, YOU CUNTS.
I bet higher taxes also prove popular, given that 99% pay them, and not that many people decide on "alternative arrangments".
It's an extension for Firefox. It's MUCH better than the integrated and rather crappy RSS bookmarks anyway since it opens a nice 3-pane window where you can arrange all your feeds and preview them.
I'm not sure where the hate for Firefox comes from BTW. It's extensible so there is little reason to encumber it with things if they can be done by an extension.
@DrXym
A lot of recent "hatred" comes because a lot of extensions no longer work, and will not be able to work, as new extension model has reduced functionality available to extension writers.
All my most used FF extensions do not work on recent FF (dishwasher tab)
I now use FF alternatives such as PaleMoon, WaterFox, which still support extensions with functionality I need
Correction - a lot of unmaintained addons no longer work. And as you say, if you need to use them, then there are browser forks where you can do it.
Of course your fork will have worse performance than the mainline because the reason Firefox changed to WebExtensions was so it could run across processes for better security and performance. The old API assumed the entire UI was single threaded which is no longer the case.
RSS could be configured to provide real-time notification of new items in a non-proprietary way. However, corporates have systematically refused to use RSS in creative ways and pushed users to Facebook, Twitter etc.
RSS can just point to a web page, so no loss of control or ads, (unlike FB and T of course)
If I wanted to use a browser with a steadily dwindling feature set, I'd use Gnome's Epiphany. Or Edge. Thanks upthread for the tip on Waterfox, looks like something worth checking out. As for news readers, unfortunately I'm one of those few particularly unimaginative types who gets confused by its interface. Not that it would matter, since it runs like molasses on my "budget" Moto E from 2015 (yes, old and _cheap_ UNIX guy here).
An interesting choice because RSS is very useful for enterprise applications. It's the easiest way to get "dashboard summaries" into people's browsers (for things like Top Ten open issues, or unread phone messages). So by removing these features Mozilla is pushing their users towards IM clients like Slack.
I use Thunderbird to view feeds, but it's a pain because you can't easily set login cookies so sites like Twitter constantly bug me about "this post may contain sensitive information".
Unfortunately I haven't found a better program, though that QuiteRSS looks interesting (I'm not too bothered about the mail capabilities of Thunderbird; Mail is always running in the background anyway).
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