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.
I would assume most RSS users already use more capable RSS readers and/or browser extensions, so it makes perfect sense for Firefox developers to remove this functionality from the browser so they no longer have to maintain it.
As a huge Mozilla and Firefox supporter, it pains me to see them aimlessly going about their product. They keep doing stuff like this. Now it’s RSS (which I like), before it was Hello (which I like), maybe in the future it’s the Screenshot upload feature (which I like). Oh, RSS is such a burden to maintain, but let’s shove Pocket down’s everyone throat.
Does anyone still remember Mozilla’s Kitchen Sink? When someone complained that Mozilla was getting too bloated, they added this:
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/kitchensi…
This was before Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix and one of the reasons why we got it.
But isn’t that the point of extensions in the browser? Functionality like RSS can easily be handled as extensions, outside the primary code base. The more complicated (and bloated) the code base is, the harder it is to port to the various platforms that rely on FF.
Browsers are riddled with functionality no one wants or uses (torrent downloads or email in opera spring to mind).
Concentrate on being a Web Browser and stop trying to be everything to everyone straight out of the box.
Sorry if I explained myself wrong. I agree that it should be an extensions. My point is that Mozilla keeps doing this: they say everything should be an extension and then they still shove things into core, like Pocket.
I wouldn’t even mind if Firefox came pre-packaged with some Mozilla sanctioned extensions, TBH. It’s not the bloat that gets to me, just the lack of consistency.
I started using this code when it was Phoenix 0.8 or so, but the last time I used Firefox as my primary browser was in 2006. Why? Because of this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/FG9…
I never thought Firefox understood RSS or really how the kind of people that were passionate about Firefox wanted the web to work. Their concept of applying their rules frustrated me.
Now, 12 years later, I use RSS as the backbone of my news, I read this article in Reeder on MacOS via Feedly subscriptions, people who understand, appreciate, and optimize consumption via RSS.
I get a chuckle knowing that eventually, they gave up on “their way” of working with RSS.
I had the same experience — Mozilla would apply one set of rules to RSS, because it didn’t interest them, and another set of rules to the rest of the product.
The original design for my website was to be *only* RSS, literally no HTML — just transforming the RSS feeds directly, except I couldn’t do that because of that bug you referred to.
Where I could have made a site simpler, more accessible, more fungible, I had to instead implement a front-end with code. This isn’t what the web should be, it’s a document platform, not a program one.
Despite presenting a case as to why it was critical that Mozilla be the ones who drive RSS use in the browser, their response was always — make an extension or fork the browser!
Mozilla talk about an open web, but they’re social media whores really and don’t care about tackling Facebook et al.
Edited 2018-10-13 15:26 UTC
Tell us more.
As a happy Palemoon user since two years or so, I did recently tried “new” Quantum Firefox. Looks like that they blocked the option to run Firefox as a root on linux-based systems. This seems PITA for me, since it was very useful to upgrade the browser in an almost “Windows” way, when you run Firefox from /opt folder.
Edited 2018-10-14 08:47 UTC
This is not a Firefox only thing. I think GTK3 is doing it as well Wayland is moving in the same direction. I would say there are different ways of dealing with this issue, but you should still be able to work around it.
I don’t think it’s wise to run any browser as root on a machine connected to the public internet, even if it’s only occasionally to upgrade the browser. Browsers are a large attack surface, so systems damage becomes a lot easier for hackers if the browser is run as root.
There are two better ways to do it:
If you have a multi-user system and want one copy of the browser to maintain across multiple users than either download/unpack/install the .tar.gz from mozilla.org manually and overwrite the previous version or have a script to package up the .tar.gz as a .deb or .rpm (I have one for the latter) and install it as a package.
Yes, it’s annoying that Mozilla has never shipped a distro-packaged Firefox (.deb/.rpm) and, yes, you could just use the distro-supplied Firefox, but LTS distros (e.g. CentOS) tend to lag a lot behind w.r.t. versions. You would need to remove the distro-supplied Firefox if manually maintaining Firefox of course.
If you’re a single user system, simply unpack/install the Firefox .tar.gz – as a non-root user – into a directory that your non-root user owns, always run it from there (you may want to uninstall any distro-shipped Firefox to avoid running the wrong one! Maybe soft-link /usr/bin/firefox to your non-root user version too) and then simply choose Help -> About Firefox as your non-root user to do any upgrades.
Edited 2018-10-14 23:45 UTC
Personally I think this is a good idea. I wouldn’t even run lynx as root, and I don’t want my software to update outside my package manager.
Yes I prefer netvibes because it works across architectures/devices. Page load time is not bad either, they have other useful gadgets like stocks, weather next to rss.
Does it still exist ? I wonder if Internet Explorer 6 is more popular than RSS.
It definitely still exists.
I know a lot of people who preferentially use RSS for updates from sites like OSnews that actually offer it (which is probably a much larger number of sites than you might think).
Then you have people like me. RSS is my preferred method of getting updates on the dozen plus webcomics I follow, since it’s pretty much the one method all of them provide, and it provides nice integration with IFTTT so I can just get notifications on my phone when they update.
The only reason you don’t hear much about it anymore is that it’s not ‘trendy’ anymore. It’s becoming more and more common for people to use services like Twitter instead of RSS for posting updates (because depending on an external service for core functionality your users expect you to have is totally a good idea).
That might be the last drop for me.
I suffered through my fav extensions getting extinct.
I suffered through degraded stability.
I suffered through some of my daily webapps no longer working properly.
That’s it. Chrome still runs circles around it in apps that matter to me despite all the sacrifices. I was ok with it because all the unique features that I have grown with were still there.
RSS are not only for blogs, any sort of list exported by external system that embodies web resource can be represented this way.
It happens to integrate very nicely into firefox bookmark system.
-You want to have recent tickets in the morning – right in your bookmarks
-You want to see ten last releases – right in your bookmarks
-You want to track recent discussion in the message board of given topic – right in your bookmarks.
All w/o waiting 10 set until the full web page loads.
It actually makes a difference in daily efficiency. I hope that a someone develops equivalent plugin for chrome now.
That is true – most RSS users already use more capable RSS readers – http://www.jaipur4fun.com