Firefox Removes Core Product Support For RSS/Atom Feeds (gijsk.com) 131
Starting with Firefox 64, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product. Mozilla's Gijs Kruitbosch writes: 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. While we still believe in RSS and support the goals of open, interoperable formats on the Web, we strongly believe that the best way to meet the needs of RSS and its users is via WebExtensions.
With that in mind, we have decided to remove the built-in feed preview feature, subscription UI, and the "live bookmarks" support from the core of Firefox, now that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons.
By virtue of being baked into the core of Firefox, these features have long had outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage. Making sure these features are as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would take a surprising amount of engineering work, and unfortunately the usage of these features does not justify such an investment: feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.
With that in mind, we have decided to remove the built-in feed preview feature, subscription UI, and the "live bookmarks" support from the core of Firefox, now that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons.
By virtue of being baked into the core of Firefox, these features have long had outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage. Making sure these features are as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would take a surprising amount of engineering work, and unfortunately the usage of these features does not justify such an investment: feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.
Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:3, Informative)
And cue the comments from the other 99.99% of users: I've never used RSS in my life.
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I need RSS and use Firefox, but I have no problem with this. Live Bookmarks have been broken for me for years, and were terribly slow even before that. I have been using an extension, Brief, for that time which works well enough. If this makes it even marginally easier for Mozilla to maintain and secure Firefox, then it can only be a good thing.
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I use RSS all the time. Why I would want to use it inside my browser, I do not know. Won't miss this.
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I also use RSS all the time (that's how I arrived at this article). While I technically don't need to use RSS in my browser, I do need a RSS application that is capable of causing web pages to be fully rendered. Whether it's viewing the rest of the article (via an http link), viewing a video, commenting on a post (like this one); access to all of the functions of a complete web browser is mandatory for how I use RSS. Compared to all the things that a modern web renderer is required to do, it seems much
Re:Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the same but opposite. I use Firefox's Live Bookmarks all the time. Why I would want to use some external program to give me a shitty UI with badly formatted text is beyond me. I click on a live bookmarks, see the title of all the latest updates and if one of them interests me I click it, it opens the page in a new tab. That's how I got to this /. article.
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
Livemarks is the closest thing you will get. It also has some issues and it completely destroys your bookmark history. Yay.
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You are absolutely correct. Live Bookmarks is a GREAT feature - dead simple, and no need for another app. Flip through them, find the ones that actually have value, and click through to read them. You can scan hundreds of article titles in no time, no waiting for an advertising and image heavy aggregation page to load, and get fully informed on the important topics without distraction. Truly a shame to lose it.
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I have been using the Live Bookmarks feature since the very beginning as well, it is how I ingest vast amounts of news, tech releases, security bulletins and lots of other things very quickly and at a glance. No other RSS reader that I have ever tried is as fast, efficient and easy as this, and why run another piece of software when I am constantly using my browser anyway?
Totally stunned that they are removing this as frankly it is one of the very last reasons that there is to keep using Firefox over just
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That's how I use RSS. I have only ever used RSS with firefox, starting from when it had sample "BBC" news article drop-down button, and I later added Slashdot to this. I don't know or care if it's the right way to do this, but it's extremely convenient to get a list of headlines without going to a web page first.
I just hope that an add-on shows up soon before I learn to live without knowing what's happening in the world.
Re:Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:5, Interesting)
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Those are growser plugins, or do you get your headlines somewhere else and then use the links to go to a browser?
Ie, right now with RSS I can click the "slashdot" button that is on the bookmark bar, and then there's a drop down list of maybe 20 headlines, and within seconds I can open a new tab for the ones I care about. For BBC I get maybe 60 headlines in the drop down. It's a great feature, and I have never seen anything else similar.
RSS lacks a value proposition for me (Score:4, Interesting)
Honest question from one of the 0.01%: How do you people parse news across the web?
I go to a handful of sites which provide most of the information I'm looking for. Some are general news sites, others are more topical or special interest. I also follow a fair number of webcomics.
Does everybody only read aggregators?
No but they are a source I use. RSS I really find constraining to be honest and for the more specific interests of mine I find it essentially useless.
Do you visit all of your sources websites individually? How is that not driving people insane? I just don't understand.
It's a handful of sites so it's genuinely not a big deal. Plus RSS isn't really making things easier for me and I find the RSS readers to be more than a little clumsy for my workflow. It doesn't organize it better or provide me more information or even reduce the number of things I click on. Plus it isn't supported by some key sources I follow. If it works for you then you be you but I don't really see much of a value proposition in it for me personally.
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There's a difference between an RSS reader and Firefox's Live Bookmarks. The live bookmarks are basically just a folder in your favorites that automatically populates bookmarks with the latest updates' title and maybe an exerpt. Clicking it open the article's webpage in a new tab in Firefox directly. If no updates interests you, you did 1 click. Fairly painless I'd say.
Remember that RSS itself is just a feed, it's up the the consumer to decided what to do with it.
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And how much of this is actually useful in your life, Other then getting you pissed off at the other guy.
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Honest question from one of the 0.01%: How do you people parse news across the web? Does everybody only read aggregators? Do you visit all of your sources websites individually? How is that not driving people insane? I just don't understand.
I'm using Google News. I used to use Google Reader, later moved to InoReader. The amount of news to read was overwhelming. Google News seems to be doing some deduplication.
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How do you people parse news across the web?
I don't.
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I think that pretty much sums it up. Different people get their news in different ways and most of us don't see a need a "parse news from across the web".
Slashdot, Hack a Day, a half dozen webcomics. RSS is superfluous for that.
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Different people get their news in different ways
I used to use Google News, but eventually I realized most news is superfluous. Ignoring 98% of the Kavanaugh news was the second-best decision I made this month.
I'll bet most people now get their news from Facebook, though.
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Posted on a website, who aggregates news of the day and displays them on a single page.
We normally only have a small number of "Trusted" sources. Of news targeted to giving us news that we actually care about. The rest we ignore in ignorance. This actually is good at keeping us sane. Because getting overloaded with too many problems of the world that you can do nothing about just drives you batty.
I have a book mark to my Local NPR stations site, to keep me advised on what is happening locally. Then I have a
Oulook (Score:2)
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Thunderbird still has RSS support and seems like a far better interface for them than Firefox. RSS news items are like email messages: you can use filters and parsing on them in Thunderbird, which is far more useful than the limited features available in Firefox.
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/sarcasm If only there was a way to have multiple tabs and save links to our favorite sites ... oh wait ! :-)
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Feedly, with Feedly Pro I can easily search for that thing I remember seeing a few days ago but didn't bother ingesting or bookmarking, but has suddenly become relevant. It also has option keyword filtering and integration with other tools like IFTT.
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Honest question from one of the 0.01%: How do you people parse news across the web? Does everybody only read aggregators?
Given that this site is basically an aggregator, you're probably going to see some bias in the answers to that one.
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I use it because they are fast text notifications to tell me instantly. Also, I bookmark to see new releases and stuff.
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I guess I am counted among the 0.01% of users.
A long time ago in a land far far away, Firefox used to come with one example of a "live bookmark" aka RSS feed. This one example used BBC World News.
Eventually, they stopped adding it, but I LIKED it. So I add an RSS feed to BBC World News to all my Firefox installations.
It is the only RSS feed that I use, so I get most of my information the old fashioned way. But I am going to miss, extremely, the loss of the BBC RSS feed.
Does that answer your question or were
Re:Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're looking at the wrong end of the stick.
RSS is useful to any user who wants to monitor many different information sources, but profit for an Internet content provider comes from goosing your engagement metrics.
RSS belongs to an obsolete and idealistic view of the Internet as an instrument for empowering users. The money to be made on the Internet comes from capturing users then analyzing and shaping their opinions and behavior. That's why "smart speakers" are a thing, but content syndication is not.
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There are a large number of types of sites that don't have the profit motive you mention. For example, I monitor my congressmen/senators by subscribing to their press release feeds, I monitor some important software projects for updates using it, as well as a number of blogs. These people don't make money by releasing content (some bloggers do for sure, but most of those that I subscribe to do not).
Any content provider who feels that RSS harms their profitability is free to not publish an RSS feed. Still
Re:Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, people are becoming so accustomed to being treated like sheep, they can't see the point of something that would give them control of their own attention span.
Being an individual takes an effort. (Score:1)
Life strives for maximum efficiency. If they brain is not needed, it is rationalized away.
The problem is, that often times, it goes too far, and starts being harmful again. That’s where efficiency becomes laziness.
That's why I oppose that "KISS"/"simplicity"/minimalism cult so much. (Not the band.) Because here, the concept itself got the "simplicity" treatment, and went from efficient to harmfully lazy.
I don't want bloat either. But it takes a real pussy to sacrifice power and freedom for "simplicity
Re: Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:2, Insightful)
You've got it 100%.
The progressive kill-off of RSS support from news sites and such was pure profit-driven.
They'd rather you see ads, and use scripts to monitor your site usage. (because for some reason, people apparently hovering words randomly matters)
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Do you work for free?
Re:Cue the 0.01% of users who "need" RSS (Score:4, Informative)
You are on point.
RSS is one of the few innovations in the web since the IE5 days that really empowered users and not ad providers / trackers.
Firefox claims to be all about enhancing users' power and privacy. They've claimed that Pocket and other things they're doing are there to try to do more to help people discover content they want without going through search engines and social media sites that track them. But RSS is one of the best ways for making that connection and they're killing it.
Try it (Score:5, Informative)
": I've never used RSS in my life."
You should try it, seriously.
Go here:
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMain
Click Bookmark in Firefox.
Select 'Live bookmarks" and decide where you're going to put it on the bookmarks menu.
Now you have a popup menu that lists the stories on Slashdot. You no longer have to visit Slashdot to see it.
It's simple, fast, clean, and pretty much the main way I read new website.
The code is already written and working in Firefox, so Gijs Kruitbosch is talking totally out of his but. None of the NEW CODE will be tested anywhere near as deeply as this EXISTING feature. He's making changes to remove it too. I honestly don't know what the real reason is, but he is talking shit when he's trying to remove a major feature like that.
I assume there is a fork I can switch to?
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A problem that I have with announcements like this is that they are misleading:
"we strongly believe that the best way to meet the needs of RSS and its users is via WebExtensions. "
"Strongly"... Yeah right.... A strong believe would mean to officially support an extension. At least recommend one, monitor its security.
This way, Firefox, Once more, helps to make an open technolgy even weaker.
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I assume there is a fork I can switch to?
Pale Moon? Haven't tried RSS yet in that one. Try it and see.
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I assume there is a fork I can switch to?
Pale Moon? Haven't tried RSS yet in that one. Try it and see.
Just tried it in Pale Moon, works in current version :)
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I tried for awhile around ten years ago. It's a good idea in theory but in practice the vast majority of the feeds I bookmarked were entirely content-free, boiling down to "THIS WEBSITE UPDATED. CLICK HERE FOR CONTENT."
And hell, I can get that without a feed reader, just by checking bookmarks.
My webcomic has an RSS feed and it gets clobbered daily by automated traffic, so it's still in use - though I doubt very much that many, if any, humans even notice or care.
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Not a "need" (Score:4, Insightful)
And chances are you've never used a braille terminal in your whole life. Doesn't mean someone else doesn't desperately need it.
Nobody "desperately needs" RSS feeds in core Firefox. There are plenty of RSS readers available for those who need one and it will still be available via extensions which is probably where it always should have been.
Show me an example (Score:2)
One man's garbage is another man's vital lifeblood. You have no idea what's vital, and not, to others.
Go ahead and show me a single credible example of someone who actually needs RSS built into core Firefox. Not wants or prefers but actually needs to the point that there is no practical alternative. Dazzle me.
The entire point of having a tight core functionality and using add-ons for features not universally needed is precisely because people's specific needs differ. It's just another version of the unix philosophy of having small tight code that does one thing well and communicates with others. If you
Re: Not a "need" (Score:1)
Yeah. We desperately need useless things like "pocket" built into firefox.
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Some ten years ago, not understanding the key interest of (separate) RSS aggregators, the first one appearing on the macintosh OS I was using at the time, did mark for me the first time I understood I was getting old.
Some other clues did hit me since then, but really, the first hit came when I did understand that I did not even understand the sheer usefulness of these apps during ONE YEAR...
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I never said nobody uses it. I'm using Firefox's own statistics here.
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As an RSS user I can admit that RSS is dying. In no small part because RSS is harmful to ad revenue. But it is a missed opportunity of those 99.99% that never tried it.
whoa (Score:5, Insightful)
So I get pocket top sites, autocompletes in my address bar to shit like hilton.com, plus other sponsored nonsense. Yet RSS feeds are too difficult to maintain?
Re:whoa (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope Pocket is next on the chopping block, it has no reason to be in the main build of Firefox.
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything ancillary to web browsing should be add-ons, including Pocket, whatever that is.
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LL RR
Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting back to being a WEB BROWSER, rather than a shitty swiss-army-knife of pointless non-browser-related "features".
Re:Finally (Score:4)
Previewing RSS feeds of web-related items is not browser related? Previewing an RSS feed is something I do on nearly a daily basis with Firefox. I do this so I can more efficiently browse some forums I participate in (in a browser).
RSS parsing simple thing and I don't understand why they feel it's such a burden, or why you feel this would be bloat. Parsing markup is what a browser does.
Mozilla is a strange organization. They are well funded now, but somehow can't find enough money to cover basic features?
At least, hopefully, there'll still be a plugin for viewing RSS feeds. After all what good is an RSS feed if you can't view it? And no I don't want to use a standalone RSS reader for handling RSS feeds that point back to web pages!
Next step: deprecate API(s) (Score:4, Interesting)
The pessimist in me thinks that if anything is to be learned of past history of Firefox development, the next step after removing a feature from core and into extensions is to deprecate / remove the API(s) this extension relies on to function. Or at least the APIs that enable it to work in a comfortable manner vs. UI experience.
Personally I use RSS feeds of 7 different blogs (wow, blogs still exist?) in order to easily follow when new posts are made. It's not much, but at least I don't have to manually check them out, quick browse through live bookmark menu is enough.
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Luckily, all the addons that replicate Live Bookmarks are forced to brutalize the bookmarks API, so they will probably work in the long run. It just destroys anything related to bookmark history, so it's fine.
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Firefox really can't depreciate the API, because they don't control webextensions. Live bookmarks extensions work fine in Chrome, so they'll work fine in Firefox.
Bad Statistics! Turn on telemetry! (Score:2)
1) Many power users who know about RSS have turned OFF telemetry data gathering by mozilla. They don't know what their power users are using. We are the users who bring in others and make decisions what gets put on to organization computer networks. I'm turning it on so they don't take away more features - if I wanted Chrome's lack of options I'd already have switched.
2) how do they measure it? by clicks? I hardly click anything in the gui already. The menu bar I have on. I never pick anything but use it
Telemetry slows it down, even if not used! (Score:2)
Pale Moon started off as a Firefox fork, so they inherited a lot from FF. See release notes http://www.palemoon.org/releas... [palemoon.org] for v28.1.0 (2018-09-20)
* Removed Telemetry accumulation calls, automatic timers and stopwatches. This removes a very noticeable performance sink for all operations on all platforms.
"Turning off telemetry" merely means not sending the accumulated data to Mozilla. The data collection and crunching is still going on if you "turn off telemetry" in Firefox.
Pale Moon has physically ripped
RSS subscribe/live bookmarks icon (Score:1)
Remember when Firefox used to display an icon in the Location bar when you were on a site with an RSS/Atom feed?
With that UI element gone, it's no surprise almost nobody's using the feature. I'd be curious what % usage was before the UI change.
Unsurprisingly, Chrome also doesn't support RSS feeds except through add-ons.
I use live bookmarks daily (Score:2)
I have feeds on my FF toolbar that show me the latest articles and I click them if one interests me. I can do it with just a single click and a wave of the mouse rather than firing up some external program. Unless they've fixed up the webextensions RSS feeds so you can have a separate button per feed (and no, having separate extensions per feed is NOT sufficient) that also generate a menu showing each item, it's not a good enough replacement, IMHO.
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
It doesn't work with Firefox Sync and makes a mess of your bookmarks history, plus it doesn't work right on Slashdot, but it is the closest you will get to Live Bookmarks.
Fools. Google Spy working at mozilla? (Score:2)
Statistics abused; again. HOW did they gather usage stats?
I click RSS live bookmarks more than ANYTHING in the GUI. If you include keyboard shortcuts the RSS feeds are #3 or #4... behind tabs, url bar, going backwards. But if you measure time spent, it's going to look like nothing.
They fail to inform users of a feature; if not HIDE it then say nobody is using it.
#1 RULE AT MOZILLA NEEDS TO BE: Do not remove anything that can't be exactly replaced with an add-on. Then they need to create a whole category
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Chrome has the added benefit it will track your use so you will receive better targeted advertisements.
Meaning I'll stay on Firefox.
I use LiveBookmarks daily, especially at work (Score:1)
I've noticed a lot of sites dropping RSS support and that severely impacts the amount of times I visit them...not out of protest, but just finding better articles elsewhere or forgetting the other s
Feed support also exists in Thunderbird (Score:2)
RSS feeds are also supported in Thunderbird, which is where is makes sense to deliver them: right alongside other streams of communication. I'll be pissed if they "come for RSS" in Thunderbird.
Message to Flash-in-the-pan Types (Score:2)
I still remember when Firefox was a 5mb download.
Morons (Score:2)
RSS/Atom? FTP? Nah, fuck you.
Pocket? Hello? DRM? Hell ya boi!!!
Great (Score:1)
Now remove pocket.
And all the dumb shit on the home page.
But goddammit (Score:2)
...I like LIVE BOOKMARKS. They're insecure? How? Seriously? What's the exploit here?
Oh well, time to switch to something different. I found this:
Feedbro [mozilla.org].