Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader from Firefox | Hacker News Reader

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

bleepingcomputer.com

145 pointsHelenePhisher97 comments

It's understandable that this is done, given the usage numbers. I've never really used live bookmarks in the past 10 years, but I always had the 'feed' navigation button appear if a site has a feed.

It still saddens me, because it's another nail in the coffin for an important technology. It's technologies like Atom/RSS that once broke us out of silos. We're back in the silo though, and I would love Mozilla to lead the front in breaking us out again.

Maybe it's not RSS and Atom that lead us into the next revolution. Maybe it's activityfeed? I want it badly though.

First of all some of us use RSS just fine. And RSS is in fact still mainstream, at least for podcasts.

I don't use Firefox's live bookmarks. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that Firefox has a "Subscribe to RSS" button and you can register your own RSS Reader such that Firefox can directly subscribe your RSS Reader when it finds a RSS link in the page's HTML. I hope that doesn't go away and right now I'm assuming that it does.

And to contradict you ... no, it's in no way understandable. I understood many choices from Mozilla, even their integration of Pocket which I like, or their integration of DRM, which I assume they had no choice in the matter. But not this.

If popularity is an actual argument, with complete disregard for that percentage of users that cares about RSS, then we should just switch to Chrome. Chrome has an extension in its app store btw that does what I want. I might as well switch to Chrome now and be done with it.

Mozilla would do well to appeal to the long tail, they can't afford not to.

The people most likely to use these features I imagine are also the ones most likely to turn off telemetry. Making decisions to remove long-standing features based on telemetry seems short-sighted to me because of this reason.

Also the ones most likely to be able to install an extension to do the same job.

That said, if you want Mozilla (or other organisations, for that matter) to make decisions based on how you're using their products, then it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation from their side that you tell them about that usage, i.e. through telemetry.

It's a trust issue. Too many companies cannot be trusted to make software that truly, effectively, anonymizes data before it leaves your device. I trust Mozilla, but I understand others don't. And it's part of the way that we lose trust in general when abuse is so common.

There are other means of getting usage data than just telemetry. Depending on it when you know some percentage of your userbase has turned it off is disregarding those users completely.

At the same time, people disable telemetry because as we've come to understand much more clearly as a society (and some of us already knew long before "recently"), there is too much data floating around about us as it is. Not all of it stored in a secured, anonymized fashion even if the organization in question claims to. People are skeptical of automatic telemetry data collection for good reason.

As I said in another comment: this is a valid concern, but not one that has a better way to deal with it other than what Mozilla is doing now, i.e. ignoring telemetry-disabled users. Or at least, there's no better way of dealing with that that I know of.

Except that telemetry is no open-ended conversation where I can present suggestions.

It's more them asking specific questions for preexisting objectives - and my browser answering them, often without me even knowing the questions.

That's a valid criticism, but not one that has a better solution than "just ignore people with telemetry turned off". Which I am afraid is the best way to deal with this so far.

"Don't use telemetry and use literally anything else" is the best way to deal with it, due to the nature of telemetry and the level of trust you are asking of your users (which is frankly insulting, given the nature of the news the past few years).

Please provide your sources for this highly questionable claim?

From where I'm standing, your comment is straight out of Kafka. You just apologetically ("I'm afraid") keep insisting that the hostility being experienced is "the best way to deal with this."

What is your source for the proposition that Firefox gains from removing RSS?

What is your source for the proposition that telemetry is superior to randomized user surveys?

Mozilla has already crippled Firefox's extension system, so why bother?

In a sense those users explicitly opt out from having their voices heard. Any other way to gather information on feature usage would most likely be massively more biased than direct telemetry.

In my anecdotal experience, this is a common problem: if your open-source project has an option for spying on users, the ones who pay attention to privacy and security opt out.

Debian's popcon survey has a worse version of this problem: it reports back the packages in use -- and nobody setting up a bunch of servers wants to leak that information, so they only get home users reporting in.

Out of interest (and this isn't a sarcastic question), how to you propose they should choose instead?

I think removing little used features is a good idea, else you slowly build up more and more things, and one thing I've learnt is that these little used features can end up upsetting more users who accidentally activate them, and are confused, than they have happy users.

Make it an extension API.

The GP noted that the more concerning thing going away isn't Firefox presentation of feeds (the live bookmarks) bit the discovery. So far, you can use the orange button to learn which page supports RSS or even learn that RSS exist in general. Without that button, even if there are extensions, only people who already know what RSS is will be motivated to install them.

Now we get that kind of default discoverability instead for proprietary services like Pocket...

A low-maintenance compromise would be to keep the button, but make it strictly extension-only. Provide an API/manifest entry where an extension can register as RSS reader. If the button is clicked, that extension gets a callback. If no extension is installed, open the Browse Extensions tab and offer an option to hide the button.

The Firefox devs would still need to maintain the button and feed discovery logic (which mostly checks for a specific meta tag, I think) but could still throw out live bookmarks, the Atom parser, etc.

The button went away by default ages ago though. Sure, you can manually add it to your menu bar, but who does that and doesn’t know about RSS already.

Fair point.

RSS is alive and doing very well. Just not in traditional readers.

It's nice that iTunes never grabbed the opportunity to lock in podcasts to their own system. They probably could've done it ten years ago. Instead we have their good solution of a few optional extensions to the mandatory RSS feed.

Oh they tried but bumbling incompetence and contractors saved the day. That and the bigger problem of iTunes being such a goatf*ck piece of software. It's like the contractors working on it were trying deliberately to make it bad.

You are allowed to say goatfuck on the internet. Nobody will punish you for it and I hazard to say the less self-censoring, the better.

I wouldn't call the "live bookmark" feature a "traditional reader" either. It is actually pretty unique, and doesn't scale very well.

I still use rss with a self-hosted tt-rss instance.

While i am sad to see Mozilla strip even more out of Firefox, live bookmarks was perhaps a real poor take on rss support.

First of all it didn't cache old entries.

second it didn't update unless the entry on the bookmarks was expanded.

third you didn't know what was read outside of a subtle icon change.

RSS more properly belongs in a email client like ui...

Precisely why I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader.

Only problem i have bumped into is easily sending a entry to the browser without reaching for the mouse.

I replicated FF live bookmark handling for Chrome years ago via an extension. This morning I laughed when I saw users opening github issues asking to port that extension to FF.

extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jp...

Best part of all is that Web Extensions API is totally based on the Chrome extension API so it should be easy! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

Well, Foxish had been ported on the same day https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

For what it's worth, I just recently released a simple feed reader that sits in Firefox's sidebar. It's meant to blend in as much as possible in the vein of the older Firefox plugin Sage. You can import OPML files from all your favorite sources (probably).

Extension is here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

The full source is here: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

Even if you don't fancy using it, you may find the source handy if you want to build an extension yourself. Also if you're interested, I'd love feedback, suggestions and bug reports.

Can't say I was even aware of it, much less used it.

I have a perfectly serviceable FOSS application to be my desktop Feed Reader (Liferea), but to be honest I never really use that, either. Wading through my news feed is now an activity that I do almost exclusively through Feedly on my phone or tablet, usually either while I'm having my morning coffee or as I'm winding down for bed.

I suppose if Mozilla had done a better job of advertising it I might've given it a second look. FWIW, Firefox's "Reader Mode" is fantastic, and if they had somehow combined that with the RSS reader, particularly on Firefox Mobile for Android where I do the majority of my reading, I probably would've been all-in. I don't believe Feedly is open source, so having one that is would be preferable in case Feedly ever decides to go the way of Google Reader and/or Pulse (which just went to garbage after LinkedIn bought it).

A very long time ago, iirc, Firefox installed with the bookmarks toolbar default on and a live bookmark example with some help text and populated with BBC news (Perhaps different in non-GB locales).

From that start it's been successively made more discrete (i.e. buried) with subsequent releases. They defaulted the bookmarks bar to off and at some point removed the pre-created example.

Yeah, pretty much an instance of a feature neglected for ages, so it's not surprising it isn't relevant now.

I feel this is a disgrace!

Not the removal of live bookmarks, it's fair to expect this to be an extension, but the removal of feed discovery. of course, it wont matter that much to most people, since Mozilla removed that functionality from the URL bar years ago and put it into a button that is not visible by default, thus making sure Joe Average never needs to think about what an RSS feed could be. I would argue that started the trend many sites picked up, where there are still feeds available, but they are nearly impossible to find unless you stumble upon some old sub page via a search engine that used to advertise them and someone forgot to delete it when it was unlinked.

Honestly, RSS is great and I don't see it dying anytime soon, but there will also be no more adaption, because it is just such a technical topic and is nearly impossible to discover the feeds and how they work unless someone knowledgeable shows it to you.

And for a web browser to have no option of displaying available feeds to the user is just embarrassing. But then, that also was the death of micro formats as useful to end-users, having no UI available to interact meaningfully.

I've been using a Firefox extension to read RSS feeds for years - the built-in RSS functionality has always been far too basic for real use.

Still, I'd have much rather seen Mozilla build better RSS functionality, rather than simply removing it altogether.

"far too basic for real use."

For some, myself included, basic is all we want. IF something piques my interest, I will open it. Otherwise, I have a basic idea of current events in < 10 minutes and get on w/ life... sans cookies, tracking, ads, java heavy page loads, etc.

Engineering 101: Simple is the most advanced technology. It is not the most profitable, however. YMMV.

I agree with all you say, except for one thing.

When I installed the fantastic Cookie Autodelete extension [links below], I had it with the option for allowing notifications on deletion, and I realised that all my live bookmarks were setting cookies.

No big deal, but thought you'd like to know.

[1] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...

Thanks, TIL. I presume Ctrl+Shift+Del(all) & BleachBit address such trackers, I use former closing tabs & latter when I close Pale Moon.

I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand...

> I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand...

It's not their main mission, I think... Some info:

- uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/827

- NoScript: https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22532&p=...

When you can't even modify the URL behind a live bookmark, nor tell Firefox to mark all existing entries read, it is beyond basic...

Right click feed/bookmark > Properties > modify URL.

I only see name and description boxes in the dialog that comes up...

You do not see "Feed Location"? It used to be there, is still in latest Pale Moon.

I only use FF latest without bookmarks nor mods(except NS+BluHell) in a sandbox for commerce and pron, so I cannot say what the current offering entails.

It worked just now, just sure what i did wrong earlier.

Maybe it had to fully load the feed before the proper dialog showed up.

I don't see any such thing. Firefox Quantum 61.0.1 on Ubuntu. I suppose it's not worth filing a bug report.

I'm a heavy user of live bookmarks. Best way to check headlines or blog updates quickly.

It's sad to see it go, but I'm sure an extension (hi, dh-g!) will surface, and the situation for fans of the feature will remain the same or even better in the end.

Still the best browser for the savvy user.

I don't think browsers make the best feed readers, but it'd be nice if they at least offered a button to detect them by default. I guess its fine to want an extension to do that, but anything that gives RSS more visibility is a win to me, even if its best consumed in a different app.

> a button to detect them by default

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/

> by default

In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. They should support the standards, but not be everything but the kitchen sink. I don't want Pocket, which is what I think they are trying to drive people towards. I've disabled it under about:config. I want a browser. More and more, I find myself using uzbl-tabbed under Arch Linux because it does one thing well. I use Mozilla now for multimedia and that's about it. My bank also balks at uzbl-tabbed. As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm. It just simply works.

> In my mind, this is a good thing. Browsers should do one thing well. ... As a *nix guy for three decades, I simply cannot escape the "do one thing well" paradigm.

As with every tool, what counts as that “one thing” is entirely subjective, in the eye of the beholder, highly personal, often arbitrary.

Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I’ve seen recently - documents, files, URLs?

It’s the exact same debate about whether programs should do any of the things that can be handled by tmux / GNU screen / readline / whatever.

For you, the “one thing” browsers should do maps exactly to what you think counts as “one thing.” To others, that might include Firefox’s RSS support, and leave out something you consider essential, calling it “bloat” and against the spirit of Unix.

> Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that?

You're close to enlightenment. ;)

There should be a renderer, there should be a network engine, there should be a persistent storage, a secret storage keyring, a history tracker, etc - and they all should be small separate programs, talking common protocols, easily replaceable.

Non-interoperable giant monoliths are why we can't have nice things anymore and have to stick with whatever large companies can provide us at their own discretion. Because it's incredibly hard to patch that behemoth and even less so to maintain the patchset. That would be possible again if there'd be a plethora of small programs, each doing its own single thing and not trying to be everything and a kitchen sink.

I'd love to be able to have only one tab bar across all my applications. Probably a Tree Style Bar though.

Or to use OP's example to make your point:

> I use Mozilla now for multimedia and that's about it

Why should Firefox support multimedia playback? Your media player can do that.

> Why should Firefox support tabs? Shouldn’t my window manager do that? Why does a browser keep track of history when my operating environment should keep track of a history of things I’ve seen recently - documents, files, URLs?

If my operating system could handle those (and that's kind of a neat prospect, actually, though maybe concerning that the host OS is actively "snooping" on what we're doing in a client application), I'd be totally pleased with the browser being just a host for a web engine. Unfortunately, they don't, so tabs, history, etc. which are fairly integral to the web itself are worth supporting directly within the browser.

Some use RSS, some don't. Some use Pocket or similar services, some don't. I have no issue with these being recommended extensions as they can boost the browsing experience for the user, but I agree they shouldn't be in the browser itself.

Now, if with Chrome/Firefox/whatever they allowed more granular customization of components like tabs such that the tab UI by a hypothetical tab management extension is 1:1 with Safari's implementation, I'd be beyond thrilled.

> though maybe concerning that the host OS is actively "snooping" on what we're doing in a client application

How is that concerning? The OS can do whatever it wants. If you don't trust it, you have already lost.

I use Pocket, but I think these sorts of things (Feed readers, tagging bookmarking services, etc.) should be outside of the browser by default.

From there, you can have addons that may be more first class citizen than others in that they integrate incredibly well, but regardless, they should be addons.

I actually use this feature quite a bit, I have various sites (HN included) in my toolbar so it makes it nice and easy to have a quick look and see if there is something interesting.

Hopefully there will be a nice simple replacement extension (or maybe it will give me a chance to make something myself!)

I use this feature for about a dozen or so sites with RSS feeds. It's nice to have essentially a dynamic bookmark that refreshes periodically to directly access articles and I'm saddened to see that this feature is going away.

This is also how I see what's new on HN and other sites I subscribe to. I've been a FF user since the early days and I've always assumed the other major browsers supported live bookmarks by default. I'm a bit shocked to find out that this was only a FF feature.

I'm concerned about this, because its removal makes it harder for basic users to use RSS/Atom. The web has become unreasonably centralized, and feed readers + RSS is tool that enables the web to be more decentralized. Yes, some people can install a separate reader, but many can't, and Feedly (etc.) provide more features than some people need. Some people really do need only the basics.

FWIW, there is a very nice sidebar-based Firefox RSS add-on called Drop Feeds - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/

It is very similar to the pre-WebExtensions Sage/SageToo/Sage++ add-ons.

I am a big fan of RSS feeds but have never used the built-in reader, but the add-on brief. Highly recommended to follows blogs, reddit or any kind of forum:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

They could have done this when they got rid of the RSS icon in the URL bar.

Maybe there was still too many people using it when the icon was visible by default, so they decided to hide it so that most people would stop using it.

I still use that button but only to easily find the RSS link because it can be hidden sometimes (I then load it up in another RSS reader).

They didn't get rid of it, they just removed it from the interface by default.

Now they're getting rid of it, i.e. you can't simply add it to the button back in. But of course, there will probably be an extension that does that.

Awesome RSS!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/

https://shgysk8zer0.github.io/posts/2018/03/02/awesome-rss/

Most feed readers these days will go and fetch the RSS link from the header if you copy a URL in. It's not great for promoting RSS, but it's not enough friction to stop me from using it.

>there will probably be an extension that does that

And then another draconian compatibility-breaking change to the extensions APIs will permanently disable said extension a year later...

The good news is that Firefox somewhat recently switched to a proper API (i.e. WebExtensions), which should prevent that from happening.

But I guess you're probably sour from WebExtensions being introduced in the first place. Which I can understand, because it did lead to many extensions no longer working. Still, it should lead to that problem being one of the past.

Also removed in the next version is The Developer Toolbar (accessed with Shift+F2).

Another thing I never used or knew existed. :)

It's been obvious since Firefox 37 that Mozilla no longer cares about "power users" or the web in general. Every step since then has been removing features and removing customization in a race to the bottom (w/Chrome) for making a safe shell for grandma to run JS web apps.

edit: apparently the exit _menu option_ cleanly closes all windows...woops.

I only use this to restart the browser cleanly when I have multiple windows open.

I use the "restore tabs/windows from last time" option and I don't see how else to close/restart ALL windows natively within FF. Guess I'll go back to killing it.

Funny, I used to have an extension for restarting the browser, but those all broke when they left XUL behind. I care enough about it that I'm patching and building myself to get a restart button (and some other stuff).

Under Linux, that's done by Ctrl+Q (provided that you have set up Firefox to restore your previous session on restart).

Is the developer toolbar the only native way to clear cookies still?

I don't know what you mean by "native" but in about:preferences#privacy you can click "clear history" and select "cookies" to clear them.

As a long time Mozilla user, I recently found Waterfox[1] and it is terrific! I found out about it here on HN so here I am spreading the Good News.

[1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

I see many recommending extensions but IMO is a good idea to minimize the number of extensions you use, if it was a Mozilla or other trustworthy entity behind the extension then it should be safer to install it.

But wasn't one of the points of the move to Web Extensions/API redesign/enhanced Mozilla review process, that extensions would be more trustworthy?

Yeah, maybe but I don't think you can 100% trust extensions, an extension can read all the content on your pages, they can do network calls so it is always a risk.

It's hard to imagine using a stripped down browser-based feed reader after using an excellent dedicated application like NewsBlur. Did FireFox synchronize your read stories across devices?

I’m pretty sad to see it go, although to be honest I’ve been using elfeed for awhile now. I wish that the promise of RSS & the open web had been fulfilled.

I've moved to using rss2email YEARS ago.

The basic idea is that RSS gets polled, and you get an email for new entries.

Your email client handles read/unread status, has labels/filtering, and can keep stuff in sync across devices. Plus, you've like A MILLION clients to choose from.

I run this as a cron script, but I'm pretty sure there's very cheap services out there that do the same (if not, here's a good business idea).

I hope feed rendering will still work. Live bookmarks where a bit cumbersome anyway, but feeds should still be properly rendered. They are an important part of the web.

Maybe this cleanup can be used to bring back the rss icon in the url bar and to link it with a better way to subscribe to feeds in a web based rss reader?

Still on Firefox 55 because I love the LiveClick RSS addon which didn't survive the switch to WebExtensions.

More and more I'm using AutoIt to provide extra features instead of a collection of addons, so I'm thinking doing the same for LiveClick.

I use it to keep track of my pinboard tags, each of which has an associated RSS feed.

Could they, perhaps, leave the indication of a feed being available for a given site as an optional component of the UI with the ability to pass to things like Feedly? I find it very useful.

I'm reading this as ending support for live bookmarks and feed preview, but not necessarily for the "open with" feature in Preferences > General > Applications that lets you pick a reader; just that Live Boomarks wouldn't be one option

Anyone knows for sure?

I expect this to still work, but I think GP and I want the "subscribe to this page" button to still work, and send the rss link to the user's third party reader. It's nice to have rss links open in the right app, but there are a ton of sites that don't have an obvious rss link on the page, but it's embedded in the html because of the spec.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622254

I found this feature perplexing even when I did use RSS.

It's the first thing I use whenever I open Firefox since years. Feeling sad about it

I love following these "RSS is dead" discussions from my RSS feed reader.

It's not really such a big deal. Everyone uses dedicated feed readers nowadays. Feedly mainly.

More than anything, I think it was just a nice to have feature. Not many people were really using it as a dedicated RSS reader, but if you ever just wanted to extract an MP3 from a podcast or get an overview of what a blog was writing recently (if there wasn't an easy way of accessing that), it came in handy.

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