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Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader From Firefox (bleepingcomputer.com) 161

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Mozilla engineers are preparing to remove one of the Firefox browser's oldest features -- its built-in support for RSS and Atom feeds, and inherently, the "Live Bookmarks" feature. All Firefox users are probably well accustomed to this feature, albeit not many have ever used it. This feature powers the browser's ability to detect when users are accessing an RSS/Atom feed and then show a special page that lets them subscribe to the feed with a custom feed reader or the browser's built-in "Live Bookmarks" feature. [...] In a recent discussion on the company's bug tracker, Mozilla engineers said they plan to remove feed support sometime later this year, with the release of Firefox 63 or Firefox 64 --scheduled for October and December, respectively.
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Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader From Firefox More

Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader From Firefox

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  • Why do I use Firefox Again? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nucrash ( 549705 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:01AM (#57012812)

    The Management of my feeds has been a primary reason that I have used Firefox over other browsers since.....

    I am deeply disappointed in the loss of this feature. I am not ready to shift to Chrome and I don't want to shift to Chrome. Yet moves like this are deeply frustrating.

    Is this a feature that others don't use? Am I unique? What's going on?

    • Re: Why do I use Firefox Again? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quintus_horatius ( 1119995 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:08AM (#57012864) Homepage

      You're not alone. I use Live Bookmarks daily.

      Like others are saying, I hope it remains available through a plug in because it will be sorely missed. If not, it's departure won't be enough to make me switch to another browser as my daily driver, but it will impact my experience negatively.

      • +1 - the live bookmarks are the way I catch up with all the crap I don't check that often. And they are great.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        There are already options for RSS reader add-ons, I use FeedBro [mozilla.org] myself. So you may or may not get something exactly like Live Bookmarks, but you certainly will have ways to access RSS feeds without leaving the browser or using a web based reader.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by chrish ( 4714 )

          That's a great suggestion, thanks!

          When Google killed Reader I moved everything over to Feedly... if Feedbro's data syncs as part of Firefox's normal sync data I can drop Feedly. Nice!

      • I don't know a lot about RSS. What I do know is that I get a list of recent BBC and Slashdot stores that I can click on. I use this daily.

        I have never seen an RSS reader that worked in a similar fashion. If they get rid of this feature i don't think a plugin would being it back. I don't want pictues, I don't want curated news, I don't want summaries, I don't want a browser page full of stories, I don't want anything that looks remotely like a phone's social media news app. I just want the headlines in a

      • Re: Why do I use Firefox Again? (Score:4, Informative)

        by blogagog ( 1223986 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @05:08PM (#57015720)
        Install the addon 'Brief'. It has it's own RSS detector built in. It will take a little getting used to, but once you do, you'll like it a lot. It's certainly better than going to Chrome!

      • I have never really been interested in RSS. Way back when, Firefox used to ship with a BBC newsfeed by default. They stopped adding that feed as a default but I really liked that feature, so I figured out how to add it back in manually.

        Oh! I am using RSS, something I was never interested in... but I was. I still have a live bookmark filled with an RSS feed from the BBC even today. I use it every day.

        What is the value in removing this feature? Why is the change necessary? Is it too buggy to maintain? Removin

    • Ive tried to use it but could never stay interested... I suspect they are dropping it because noone uses it. RSS seems to by dying as a technology.

      • In many ways RSS isn't needed as much. Back in the dial up days and broadband that is less then 1mbs RSS was almost nessary as we could get the info we wanted without waiting for pictures to load up, crazy ads, Javascript that was not well coded, and the crazy plugin feature. RSS were clean way to get data.

        However today, we have data aggregation sites, and bandwidth is often not a big deal, even a heavy website, is fast to load.

        That being said, I don't get the reason behind removing it, unless its mainten

        • The rendering engine of Mozilla has been reworked, and the chrome (not Chrome) around it is next, to profit from the improvements.

          This means that features aren't cut from the code so much as simply not ported. Though that is not much of a distinction, but it may explain that bugs have nothing to do with it.

          This is not the first time Mozilla have done this. Firefox was originally a minimal port of Netscape's Navigator with just enough functionality for web browsing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          bandwidth is often not a big deal

          If you believe that, would you be willing to let us forward you the monthly data transfer allowance overage bills from our ISPs?

        • With all due respect, I have almost the opposite view : I use RSS aggregators everywhere (on my website, computers, phone) with a single aim : eliminating advertisement and fancy website interfaces, leading to a simple, clean, homogeneous presentation along *all* my information channels (and I have over 100).
          Without aggregators I'd be terribly less efficient.
          Now, that FF removes this doesn't bother me at all -I love aggregated info but not all-in-one things, and I switched to dedicated apps almost when RSS

      • Or in other words, nobody gives a rat’s RSS...

      • I found it easier to just have often used websites open in windows or tabs. If I wanted to look at a website I just pressed Ctrl + T, started typing in the first two letters of the URL, and I was there. I never understood what the big time saver was with RSS. I was also a web-developer from 1998 to 2012 so also looked at how it worked. The idea sounds good on paper, but the benefit of it was miniscule in my personal experience.

        • I never understood what the big time saver was with RSS

          Then I will be happy to demonstrate to you.

          Websites used to show new links as blue underline (default) and visited links as purple (default).

          Now web sites want you to come back over and over again, and to appear to read lots and lots of pages, and so they resort to a variety of tricks to achieve this.*

          #1 for our purposes here is they no longer use purple for visited links. Worst is when the color doesn't change at all -- guaranteeing people will re-cli

        • RSS for me just gave me the headlines in a live list of bookmarks. Then I could choose the ones I wanted to look up and open them in their own tabs and throughout the day I would read the articles. This is not at all the same thing as going to a news site's front page and having to scroll down past the fluff to find what I'm interested in. It's a major time saver. I can see the top news story at a glance, I don't have to waste the time to switch over to a new page and wait for it to load.

          If they can do

    • Re:Why do I use Firefox Again? (Score:5, Informative)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:15AM (#57012926)

      The RSS feature is not very good in Firefox. You should really switch over to a desktop RSS feed reader. The parser in the Firefox RSS feed reader is hacked together and on a lot of feeds will silently error and give you garble or no feed entry at all. Usually happens with feeds that mix media in with the XML, such as podcasts, but even an RSS feed that uses images can sometimes make the parser go haywire.

      I get you, and it's really disappointing that they never went back to update the RSS feature to be better. But yeah, the code is old (like seven years old) and no one really wants to fix all the problems it had. It was a pretty neat feature in Firefox, but once I switched over to a desktop based (Liferea) the difference in how the content was rendered was pretty obvious. Additionally, it supported Podcasts as well so that was a nice plus. So it's a shame that the Feed feature never got the polish it should have, but yeah you at least owe it to yourself to try a desktop client and compare it to Firefox RSS. I don't know what feeds you use and if they're pretty Plane Jane, you might never know the difference, but the Firefox RSS just never got the love it should have. Maybe someone will rewrite it into a plugin or something? Maybe make it the client it should of been?

      • I tried desktop RSS feed readers many years ago, back in the Firefox 3.0 era, when the RSS update happened in the main UI thread and would draw your browser down to an absolute crawl. Nothing I found worked the way I actually use RSS feeds.

        I mainly use Live Bookmarks for webcomics. I have around a hundred I follow. Every day, I roll down a big folder on my bookmarks bar that has a Live Bookmark "folder" for each of them, and read any unread entries, one at a time. This does take a while but most of that tim

      • I want the headlines listed, then use the Web as the reader. Because every single one of those live bookmark links is a URL that goes to a web site. Why have a third party reader display a web page when a web browser can do this? I'm not using Firefox RSS like other people use RSS I guess. All I want is a list of titles and when I click on them they go to the URL.

        • Well I can only comment on the RSS reader that I use which is Liferea. Let me first start out by saying, I'm not saying everyone should move to a desktop reader, but you ought to give it a try. But I'll admit, it's definitely not for everyone so YMMV. Now with that said, you can setup the middle mouse button in Liferea so that when you middle mouse click a headline, it opens that up in a browser. You check that out and see if that works for you, if of course you're on a Linux box that is.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by coliva ( 311680 )

      They aren't killing off RSS/Atom, just a part of their code that they don't want to maintain and has lesser usage. No big deal. There are multiple plugins and many non-Mozilla solutions. I use the Brief plugin and it works well for me.

    • I have tried several RSS addons for Firefox. Feedbro works well. It is how I read all my news across many web sites.

    • Surely extensions will crop up to replace the missing functionality, which is where it actually belongs — like everything which is not core browser functionality. If you run Pale Moon, you can use these extensions [palemoon.org] (two of three of 'em, anyway) to read feeds.

    • I've never understood using a UI for data that I expect to stay the same for viewing data that I expect to change.

      Then again, I don't even use the bookmarks UI for bookmarks.

    • Is this a feature that others don't use? Am I unique? What's going on?

      I tried it when Google abandoned their Reader, but I quickly settled for Feedly : having my feeds status on multiple machines (work desktop, home desktop, laptop, mobile phone) is a must for me.

      YMMV

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rnturn ( 11092 )

      No... you're not alone. I use the RSS feature to watch for updates to newsletters and podcasts. And here I was considering making a move back to Firefox. Now it'll likely be relegated to an add-on that will break every other time Mozilla releases another update and then will eventually be abandoned. (sigh)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gnunick ( 701343 )

      Is this a feature that others don't use? Am I unique? What's going on?

      Just another anecdotal observation, but I've been using Firefox since it first came out, and wasn't aware it even had an RSS reader. No loss for me, but I also never made a habit of following RSS feeds.

      IMHO the best thing about Firefox is it was the browser from Mozilla without all the bloat that made it suck. All I want from my web browser is a web browser (that's fast, easy to use, not from an advertising and/or evil company, and works

    • You can try switching to other RSS software. I use Tiny Tiny RSS, and am very happy with it. It has lots of plugins, such as inlining the content (via Readability). There are also a few mobile apps if you prefer to make it easier to read on your phone (or download everything for offline viewing, which is great for flights). I used to be an avid Google Reader user and moved away from RSS when they shut it down, but now I browse primarily via RSS.

  • Feeds are too user-centric. You might not have all your reading choices aggregated and tracked by a central authority!

    • Re:well, sure (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:05AM (#57012840) Journal
      Also, if you are allowed to use feeds, you might get updates on things in mere chronological order or something crazy like that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nucrash ( 549705 )

        Yes, one of the things that is maddening about many social media platforms. They are trying to steer you into conversations you don't care to engage. The value of social media has dropped significantly since I took a hiatus this year. Reason enough for me to continue to step away.

      • You might even see news articles that your social media profile does not indicate you are normally interested in. It would be horrible if people managed to learn what actually happens in the world.

    • Feeds are too user-centric. You might not have all your reading choices aggregated and tracked by a central authority!

      Feeds don't circumvent that either.

  • Mozilla Can't Win (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:13AM (#57012912)

    When Mozilla adds new features to Firefox because that's what keeps people upgrading and using the product, they are blamed for adding bloat and slowing the product down. When Mozilla removes little used features, suddenly they are doing away with a vital function and the one reason a person had for continuing to use Firefox.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      See Also, Microsoft.
      This is slashdot, everything everyone does is wrong.

    • Well what is the cost/benefit analysis of removing the feature that has already been there. Will it save a meg of storage? or does this feature adversely affect overall performance?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jon3k ( 691256 )
        It might use screen real estate or keyboard shortcuts that cannot be used by other parts of the application. It might also add complexity to the menus that confuses casual users. But mostly, sometimes it is easier to pull out old code than constantly maintain it as the rest of the application evolves, especially when hardly anyone uses it.

      • The Mozilla team is already set in its decision and has even drafted a blog post for the official announcement. In this unpublished document, engineers share more of the reasons that led to the decision to remove Firefox's built-in feed support and Live Bookmarks utility.

        â-- Live Bookmarks doesn't really have a concept of a "read" state. It uses a history visit state as a proxy, which doesn't work for redirects.
        â-- Live Bookmarks doesn't work well with Firefox Sync
        â-- Live Bookmarks is not available for Android or iOS and has no mobile integration
        â-- Doesn't work well with podcast types of feeds
        â-- Only 0.1% of the Firefox userbase uses Live Bookmarks
        â-- Outdated and hard to maintain code (last update was 7 years ago)
        â-- Uses its own custom code for various tasks instead of reusing Firefox's current libraries

        "These features had an outsized maintenance and security impact relative to their usage," the draft announcement said. "Making these features as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would have cost significant time and effort, and the usage of these features doesn't justify such an investment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      So maybe they should keep the features they have and do not add stuff nobody missed before. Win-Win.

      • So maybe they should keep the features they have and do not add stuff nobody missed before. Win-Win.

        As the customer base slowly rots and dwindles.

  • For fuck's sake (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:14AM (#57012922)
    The death of Firefox with version 57 was bad enough, now the corpse is decomposing as well. I don't think Waterfox amd Palemoon will be able to keep up with the surge in users they're getting from Firefox refugees. Can we take any sort of action to force Mozilla to stop removing features?

    • Can we take any sort of action to force Mozilla to stop removing features?

      No.

      What you can do is fork it and maintain the feature yourself.
      (Or pay someone to do it for you.)

      Who knows, your fork might see wider adoption than the mainline version.

    • If they had anybody with a brain in management at Mozilla, they'd NOT remove anything without making an API for somebody to add back an equal or greater replacement! They should give TIME for some to surface and then have a whole category on the Add-on site for restoring old firefox features. It is just basic customer service; when you upset the customers provide them SOMETHING they can do about it. Hell, Mozilla promotes "freedom" yet they keep imposing their BS onto others. They could poll users and at

  • Since ESR releases are supported for a year, with ESR60 you will keep this feature for a year.

    By that time, some sorto of alternative solution (in the form of an extension or plug-in) will be available.

    That is what many of us did with the blocking of plug-ins and XUL that acompanied the shift to Firefox quantum...

    Best of luck

  • Um, why are they doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mad zambian ( 816201 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:19AM (#57012962)

    The RSS reader is something I use regularly, and have something like 30 feeds subscribed to including the one here on Slashdot. It is way easier (much faster) to skim through the RSS feeds for headlines, rather than going to the website itself. But pageviews etc, is what count these days I guess. Screw the user's time and any data caps.

    Mozilla gets a downvote for this one.

    • Re:Um, why are they doing this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by scrimmer ( 229387 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @11:17AM (#57013362)

      It is way easier (much faster) to skim through the RSS feeds for headlines, rather than going to the website itself.

      This captures it perfectly.

      I've 63 subscribed feeds, about 55 of which I review daily. Skimming for relevant headlines and then opening those pages in new tabs has become a central part of how I, and others I've introduced the feature to over the years, find and read articles on the web. I've curated a wide range of sources through LiveBookmarks and RSS, and this Firefox feature has been the most efficient way for me to find items of interest. I might also add that I'm using, by today's bleeding-edge standards, antiquated hardware, as I'm sure not an insignificant number of users do, and the RSS feature helps to facilitate web browsing.

      (And, I saw the headline for this story through my RSS feed for Slashdot.)

    • I only go to slashdot from a RSS bookmark and other sites. I suppose it will save me time but in the end I'll just hate mozilla's idiotic management more. The limited resource excuse is always a fallback for BS arguments; it's not honest many times it is used - this is an existing feature which made it past many big transitions; they don't need to rewrite it in rust.

      Many of these IDIOTIC moves are not technical like the multi-process transition. Management must be all narcissistic novice users. Power user

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jon3k ( 691256 )

      After careful consideration of various options (which also included doing nothing, or investing heavily in updating the code), we've decided to go ahead and remove builtin feed support from Firefox. This metabug covers both the removal and creating public documentation for users (e.g. on support.mozilla.org ) of alternatives.

      I believe they've decided it is easier to remove a feature that is not used heavily versus maintaining it. You could certainly offer to maintain it yourself. Or you could use one of the many, many alternatives for RSS. Personally I don't need my web browser to be my RSS reader. I also like to be able to use RSS from multiple locations, which is why I use TinyTiny-RSS [tt-rss.org] which I access via my web browser using the web interface, an iOS application [apple.com] on my mobile device as well as via the command line using ne [newsbeuter.org]

  • Seems reasonable to me (Score:4, Insightful)

    by urusan ( 1755332 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:20AM (#57012976)

    I use Firefox and I didn't realize this was a feature. The engineers seem to have thought it through, and it makes sense to remove this kind of largely unused legacy code, since it costs time and money to test and maintain. I mean, the last updates were 7 years ago. They're also giving a migration path for the users and there are reasonable alternatives, so it's not like they're just leaving people out in the cold.

    Most importantly, it's really a feature that makes more sense as an extension than as a built-in part of the browser. As an add-on it can evolve separately from the browser, and multiple extensions can compete with each other (and fill in different niches) without having to go through the trouble of developing a full web-browser.

    • Most importantly, it's really a feature that makes more sense as an extension than as a built-in part of the browser. As an add-on it can evolve separately from the browser, and multiple extensions can compete with each other (and fill in different niches) without having to go through the trouble of developing a full web-browser.

      If they would allow addons to alter the UI beyond adding single little button, you'd be right. Unfortunately, they don't. There is no way to duplicate the Live Bookmark feature because, as of FF 57, support for altering the UI like that has been removed.

    • Just because that section of code hasn't been updated in 7 years doesn't mean that people aren't using that feature. It just means that feature is working well enough that the developers haven't had to modify that code. It hasn't caused any major problems and if there are any bugs filed then they have been relatively minor so that not working on them hasn't impacted the rest of the browser.

      Code churn != use of feature

  • Nice move (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tsolias ( 2813011 ) on Thursday July 26, 2018 @10:30AM (#57013068)

    They've been shitting on firefox's code since the version 27.0.
    They destroyed the add-ons community,
    they destroyed the interface,
    they have zero mobile presence,
    they lost a shitload of market-share,
    they started taking political positions,
    and what did they learn about this?
    remove moar features.

    do you remember https://www.reddit.com/r/firef... [reddit.com] ?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      and what did they learn about this?
      remove moar features.

      and yet, if the article was about adding a feature, everyone would bitch about bloat.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by amorsen ( 7485 )

      And they're massively better off for it.

      Modern Firefox is an absolutely great browser.

    • Yeah and have produced a fantastic browser as a result. The Firefox team doesn't owe you anything. Don't like it? Click here: http://chrome.google.com/ [google.com]

      • this sounds like
        "If you don't like firefox transforming into chrome, download chrome."
        No, thanks. I'd rather use a fork.

  • Before everyone freaks out... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The feed reader functionality in Thunderbird doesn't show signs of going away (I hope...). If you want a place to easily drop your feeds into, Thunderbird's been working fine for me since I left Liferea. No need to integrate email functionality whatsoever, just set it as your default feed reader only if you use another email client or webmail.

    Don't Mozilla-bash too hard when another of their offerings is still doing what people want. :P (hint, Mozilla, hint)

  • I have been using Netvibes to aggregate all my RSS feeds onto a single page since the demise of iGoogle. As it's all browser-based, it's easy to get to it, whatever device you're on. It works better than a dedicated RSS feed application for me at least.

  • All Firefox users are probably well accustomed to this feature, albeit not many have ever used it.

    Can anyone explain the meaning of this sentence? I literally can't figure out what he's trying to say there.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Feedbro is nonfree software; according to its license entry in Firefox Add-Ons (where the site you pointed to directs users to get the Feedbro add-on) the license is "All Rights Reserved".

      Feedbro tries to convince you they care about your privacy by including "We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow." on their site but that's completely unverifiable. If they really believed privacy was important, users included, they'd distribute the software as free software -- free fo

  • Seriously, I would like a month to go by without Firefox removing some feature I use daily. I'm already stuck on FF 56 indefinitely due to continuing lack of multi-row tabs on later versions. Live bookmarks are the way I keep up with news... pull down the feed, see at a glance anything I might want to read, like this story for example. I use it to keep up with Craigslist ads too, based off search queries. I've never found anything nearly as convenient.

    Why would I want to use a separate program to see br

  • My sympathies. I never used the firefox tool, but I understand the frustration with disappearing readers.

    I recommend https://theoldreader.com/ [theoldreader.com] as a replacement.

  • Thunderbird (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Leave it in Thunderbird and nobody gets hurt...

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