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> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups

One part of me believes this would be the best native addon coming from Mozilla in years.

The other part of me worries it would bring on a new age of Eternal September to Usenet, which has been isolated long enough again to form a particular kind of culture that would seem fragile in the face of sudden mass immigration given the size of the Usenet community today.

Google makes some IMO very weird decisions about seemingly low effort/cost offerings, even if a bit niche, that would seem to be very complementary to products/services that it does put its full weight behind. Dropping Reader didn't make a lot of sense to me for this reason. The lukewarm support for Scholar is another.

Google's infrastructure is geared towards making enormous services cheaper to run, at all costs. As a result, the maintenance burden of Reader was far higher than you might have expected.

That should explain at least part of the decision.

> If Firefox had an option to open newsgroups, with proper filtering (not just on the overhead headers, but on the HEAD of each message), I would use it all the time, and I believe many thousands of other people would too.

Newsgroups were always bundled with email clients, so Thunderbird has support for NNTP.

I know, I said that in my post:

    It makes sense to have Usenet in an email client, 
    because they are closely related, but not many people
    use email clients any more, so not many people are 
    going to find Usenet that way.

Netscape Communicator, anyone?

Never mind Opera 12 and older.

Could be that we will see Vivaldi revive this, if they ever get that far...