Hacker News Reader

Comment by cJ0th | Hacker News Reader

I am super disappointed, Mozilla! This is such a slippery slope you've created here. If FF doesn't support RSS anymore then even fewer people will use RSS and RSS will die rather sooner than later. This is such a pity as RSS can really empower users.

You basically infringe your own mission statement:

> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

View on HN

I don’t see how removing support for rss infringes on this statement. You can still install a plug-in to shape your own experience. In fact, it could be argued that including their own rss support when most users don’t even know what RSS is was itself infringing on that statement.

How could including support for a technology possibly harm users? What is with this obsession with scrubbing any features that are not "popular" enough?

This mindset comes from for-profit companies. It makes sense for them to obsess about metrics and engagement. But what are you losing by challenging users and making something good?

So much amazing and important software has poor engagement with uneducated users, but it would be considered worthless garbage because it isn't popular with users who don't care in the first place.

All code has a cost, and all code needs to be maintained. It is not as simple as you might think to just leave something in.

Not only this, but having a default and free option built in disincentivizes the kind of experimentation and creative destruction that could develop the platform. Especially if the technology itself isn’t a priority for making the browser.

This is basically how Google hobbled RSS and why it’s on life support today. Reader was great and free. It got cannibalized for their erstwhile social networking bid and the entire ecosystem nearly died when it went away because it had the market cornered.

Wait, what? You're comparing FF's bare-bones live feeds feature to Google Reader? They are night and day. Live bookamrks were meant to be a bare minimum, a starting point for users to get a feel for RSS. No one in their right mind would say they were discouraging competition and experimentation. As evidence: all the great RSS readers (NetNewsWire, Reader, Feedly, etc.) were created while live bookmarks still existed.

I do not believe that it is too expensive to Mozilla to support RSS. If you had to quantify the cost in a dollar amount, it would probably be far less than the money that they spend on single one of their promotional events.

If they had promoted and made a feature of explaining RSS instead of downplaying and hiding it. They could have promoted it and put RSS feeds on new tabs instead of advertising and what's popular on Pocket.

Most users don't know what RSS is until it is explained to them. Most users don't know what pocket and a whole bunch of other things are either until some explanation is given.

Taken to the extreme this strategy means an ever increasing mountain of things to explain to people. Or things they are expected to learn to become 'literate'.

That said I do find open, broadly supported standards liberating, but I'm a developer. And at times even I give up in favor of simpler, inferior solutions.

But it is not about taking it to an extreme. RSS is one old and popular technology (it is far from dead, see how many people use feedly and other feedreaders) that fits perfectly to the mission of Mozilla. To support it properly not much is needed:

1. Show an icon when the current site supports RSS feeds.

2. Make that icon a button that leads to the rendered RSS feed.

3. Have a way there to subscribe to the feed.

Live bookmarks were a strange feature, I'm not saying they are the perfect solution to handle point three. It could be something like the reader selection list of https://www.subtome.com/

> And at times even I give up in favor of simpler, inferior solutions.

RSS is already the most simple solution for its problem.

Personally I think browsers would be better if they made it easy to get subscriptions into feed-focused tools or services _in a standardized way_. Because browsers are originally intended for browsing and not consuming or producing feeds. (They could expand into such a role, but the reader Ff had didn't aggregate feeds well.)

It's not complex enough to need extremes or great long explanations. A simple "show me" or offer to add first couple of encountered feeds to their new tabs, and perhaps a couple of popups "your XKCD feed updated! [Show]" should do it. Maybe add a notification icon to updated live bookmarks.

You know, rather less than the low level of effort put in to promoting the recently purchased Pocket.

If people can be enthusiastic about wanting auto-updating podcast apps or push notifications and auto-updating news then RSS "failed" for reasons other than capabilities or being too complex to grok.

Reason: more PPM revenue. If people don't go to articles directly, but go through banner laden front pages, they get bigger cut.

Exactly. Firefox is not going to "win" by copying Chrome's feature set, dropping features that doesn't have enough "usage" and then compete against thousands of Chrome developers on features that they already are dominating in.

FF should work on the features that Chrome is ignoring, like RSS, so that those core set of people continue using FF. It's stupid to take the mentality of a for-profit product when they are strictly non-profit. So what if very few people are using it, it's the collection of features that will define Firefox over Chrome.

You're not going to win by taking on Chrome head-to-head, that's a losing battle.

FF has clearer financing and better aligned projects to the browser through the entities being truly separate between Mozilla and alphabet than chrome has through being a cost center for alphabet. Chrome gets almost no portion of the profits its search bars bring in. Success for a chrome project manager is in supporting alphabet's other projects more than its own market share.

Staying focused on developer tools, being an improved clone of chrome, using rust to achieve better security/speed/clarity, and beating chrome to implementing standards will make them the browser developers do alpha testing on instead of the second platform. That eventually means the most popular browser.

Google's needs push chrome into the wrong place and the wrong priorities just like every vendor provided browser before chrome. I.e. C++ sucks but Alphabet politically has no replacement because their real needs are either server side services (go) or 3rd party developer languages (dart? Something to replace java?) that can't be the foundation of a decent browser.

Chrome is only as successful as it is since Mozilla has a cycle of destroying a fast and debuggable system by trying to bring in the kitchen sink. The very existence of FF is from a group that forced Mozilla to back away from a suite of everything every fringe user wanted that was becoming the worst experience imaginable.

They hid the RSS icon a while ago so that the telemetry would tell them that almost noone uses it so that they could remove it from firefox... Firefox is still my favorite, but things like this make me wonder sometimes.

To be fair, they probably had telemetry on the RSS icon before its removal that told them almost nobody clicked on it. That said, I definitely see this as abandoning an important web principle that Mozilla could have pushed instead. With a good RSS experience that would sync with Firefox mobile, I think they could have gained traction.

The problem is that a robust synced RSS capability would compete with Pocket, and someone at Mozilla appears to have bet their career on the idea that they can make Pocket into A Thing. So they pushed hard enough to get Mozilla to acquire Pocket's developers, which was highly unusual all by itself. And now, even as Mozilla diligently goes about pulling other stuff out of Firefox, Pocket keeps getting jammed deeper and deeper in -- presumably on the notion that if Mozilla pushes it down our throats hard enough, eventually we will learn to like the taste.

With the recent planned re-branding for FF maybe they should just change the name to Pocket Browser /s

I can't speak for anyone else but not true for this ~16 year, nonstop FF RSS user. My contribution is worth as much as anyone else's and so far, the only one to respond to you with data either way. I always kept it enabled[0] for the reason you mention.

[0]https://i.imgur.com/NxBHxHk.png

Good point but I don't think a company like Mozilla should rely on this kind of analytics... I use this browser to try to protect my privacy as much as possible so this telemetry "feature" is disabled but I did use the RSS feature to find feed addresses.

thanks dang

The conspiracy theorizing is fascinating considering so much of Mozilla’s work is done in the open.

The simpler and most likely answer is that the number of people who use RSS but don’t use a dedicated native or online reader is almost vanishingly small.

actions speak louder then words?

Despite RSS' cult status among Hacker News readers, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that RSS is already dead. It's been dead. I would even go so far as to say it was dead on arrival, because the average user was never able to make any sense of it.

RSS is not dead. I have many feeds that I auto-filter and check on a daily basis. Furthermore it is enabled by default on countless wordpress blogs. RSS is not complicated from an end user's point of view. But since it gives users more control to handle their information diet nobody poured money into a marketing campaign to make it more popular with "average users".

As much as I love RSS (as someone that made and sold one of the first news aggregators), you're an outlier. If you asked 10 random people what RSS is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it?

Edit: Ok, I should reframe this. An anecdote or random sampling doesn't matter when Mozilla knows how much the feature was actually being used.

I'm not sure "random people" are the target market for RSS.

What's your point? A great technology should be abandoned just because it's not popular? Maybe I am not average but the fact is that RSS is very helpful to many professionals like programmers, scientists or journalists on a daily basis. What's the alternative? Should we manually skim e-mail newsletters that don't follow a strict structure? Should we all get our information off facebook? Should we waste our time checking a bunch if not hundreds of websites manually every day?

I agree it has utility and not saying whether it should be abandoned or not. I just meant that an anecdote doesn't prove anything and doesn't necessarily apply to the average population. Mozilla knows better than we do.

What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them?

I think RSS is cool too, but that's not an argument for why browsers should integrate RSS feeds in their menu structures. Whether RSS is dead or not isn't an argument as to whether firefox's live bookmarks feature should continue existing. People don't use it, so it got pulled.

> do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them?

It's not unused, but sure, keep repeating that to yourself. And yes, they should continue including it. What exactly do they gain by removing it?

There's a reason Feedly has millions of users and it's not because RSS is dead and nobody cares.

> What exactly do they gain by removing it?

More developer resources?

> What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features[?]

YES. Yes even if not a single person uses it. If it makes sense and might be useful, and especially if it is already there, then it should stay.

I haven't used POP3 in about a decade, and only used FTP a few times in ten years, but I would be miffed if they were deprecated. I want the option to use them if I must. That availability is itself a feature. And RSS is a hell of a lot more useful and common.

And I know that if they remove it that there almost certainly wasn't a sound technical reason for it, it was just someone being judgmental about what features should be available.

Or, what about a spare tire? Isn't it wasteful that our cars are burdened with carrying around all this extra weight in the trunk? How many time in your life have you actually needed to use a spare tire? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that <5% of drivers ever even touch the thing, and yet every car has one! In this day and age, you should just call a tow truck. Spare tires a relic of the time before cellphones.

By your logic, the only features that are worthwhile are popular features. Nearly everything starts out with 0 users. Why bother making anything? Should something get axed the moment it dips in popularity? I know that these days the answer of course is yes.

FYI, the only reason that companies like Apple and Google are so aggressive with feature culling and deprecation is to protect their platforms and help dominate the market. That is it. When OSS copies the decisions of for profit companies then that is just a cargo cult mentality.

Supporting even completely unused features creates significant costs, including:

-- Tests for those features still run regularly

-- Increased download size

-- Increased runtime code memory usage (it's impossible to completely separate code pages for unused features from used features)

-- The code must be maintained as interfaces they depend on are refactored

-- Attackers will find exploitable bugs that harm users and must be fixed

We are talking about the RSS reader. How many extra megabytes do you think it will add to the download?

Of course it doesn't make sense to drop support for a feature that has no users because it has only just been added. Fatures need time to find an audience. And of course a feature should not be axed as soon as its popularity dips. Those are straw-man arguments. But RSS is neither of those things. Firefox RSS support has been in the browser for a very long time and its popularity has declined over a very long time.

> "audience"

What "audience"? Why are you using that nomenclature? This is not an entertainment product, nor is it for-profit software. So why do you care about building an audience and a brand? How about instead we make actually good software.

Ironically, some new cars nowadays aren't being sold with spare tires.

> Or, what about a spare tire?

There's one spare tire. If cars were carrying around spares of 10 different things, you bet people would be looking into cutting some of them out.

There is a real cost in terms of technical debt, complexity, ease of maintenance, etc to having more features. The question then always becomes whether the features are worth the cost.

> YES. Yes even if not a single person uses it. If it makes sense and might be useful, and especially if it is already there, then it should stay.

By this argument, Pocket has to stay, and I hope that's at least not the universal sentiment. I want Mozilla to have a stripped-down core and be endlessly customiseable by add-ons; Mozilla themselves have drifted away from this vision, but I hope that their most passionate users won't!

> Or, what about a spare tire?

The argument isn't about whether you should have a spare tire, but whether the spare tire should come pre-installed by the manufacturer. You can buy another spare tire just like you can install an RSS add-on, or use a separate RSS reader.

For example: I have never used RSS, until relatively recently I was not actually sure exactly what RSS was (except that it had "something to do with blogs"), and wouldn't know what to do if I wanted to start using RSS without at least doing some Googling first.

Which is exactly why having stuff like this in the browser is useful: You don't know what RSS is, but you could discover and use Firefox's live bookmarks without knowing that. Mozilla hid this stuff, so it's no wonder usage rates are low, the question is if that's the correct way to take for an organization with Mozilla's goals.

Your experience seems to be common, and I wonder what sort of critical marketing failure is responsible for that, because RSS is really straightforward: it shows you which of the blogs/webcomics/podcasts/etc. you follow have updated recently, in one place, without cramming up your email or bombarding you with alerts. It's like a Twitter/Tumblr homepage, but for the entire web.

It's not like trying to explain what Google Wave is for; it's no more difficult than getting started on Twitter. It's really strange to me that it's still such a Here Be Dragons thing.

If I asked 10 random people what IP is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it?

The usage metric from FF data is a solid spot to look.

Whether random folks know the technology is irrelevant. Ask 10 random people if they know what hyper text is, and you'll get bad answers. Doesn't mean people don't use or like it.

The shame here, is that Mozilla didn't push to get stuff like their homepage driven from RSS based feeds. They didn't get people using RSS, but they also didn't seem to try.

That's not a great argument. You could ask 10 random people anything about anything and they wouldn't know the answer. Ask your 10 people if they know about Chrome sync, once they fail, and they will, remove that feature too. And that one has the massive advantage of 60% marketshare.

With the standard you've setup, we'd remove almost every piece of technology around us. Our institutions and everything that consists of your way of life. Seriously. No one really studies liberal arts as a renaissance man anymore and knows about things around them, how they work, or how we got here.

There's a lot of things to be aware of today, if you want to be savvy and successful. People aren't even prepared to educate themselves, work a career or save for retirement. Of course they never bothered, once, to look into the features of the web browser.

I always try and always read or skim the manual, so to speak, because I've learned many things about even my iPhone that I kick myself for not finding out before that point. But that's not common for people to actively educate themselves.

RSS is amazing, and Mozilla certainly deserves to be labeled as Luddites for this.

It strikes me as very hypocritical, especially coming from Mozilla who praises themselves as a savior of the free web technologies. It will do nothing other than harm the open web. More blogs, podcasts and artist will have the incentive to include Twitter and Facebook buttons where you will be able to "see the updates".

It should've been clear to everyone when Mozilla acquired Pocket. They feel obligated to build that out with their zero vision. What they should be doing at this point, is retasking that team to finding new and creative ways to build upon RSS/Atom feeds and integrate them with the browser. I'm sure there's a lot of ideas that haven't been conceived.

How about just a simple feed that scrolls somewhere? Maybe even with transparency over a portion of your browser? Certainly would beat checking the Facebook feed. Those are just off the top of my head, if someone with half a spark of humanity within their mind sat down and worked on ways to advance free & open technologies, a lot could be done that hasn't been.

There's a lot to do, but Pocket should have nothing to do with it other than at most, being the name of possibly cloud storage for your RSS feeds that you want to read later. If they think they'll figure out a way to make Pocket some sort of killer feature and takeover Chrome's position in the market, I can't help but laugh.

Even in the heyday of RSS 10 random people were unlikely to know what it was. It was always a niche technology but it’s primary niche was specifically people who were influential parts of internet culture and the blogosphere. This included the HackerNews demo, but also bloggers, journalists, and entertainers.

It’s not a mass market feature, but the market is serves has ripple effects. Because of that, though, the people using it are likely to prefer better, more robust tools rather than the neglected offerings built into the browser.

I am developing a little site which is a news aggregator and search engine for a certain niche topic. Out of a couple hundred sources, I'd say more than 95% support RSS, basically anything that uses wordpress or any blog or CMS system. I was really surprized how widespread it still is, and it makes my life a whole lot easier, since I don't have to scrape all those sites.

Maybe the model of subscribing to all your favorite blogs with a news reader didn't catch on, but RSS is still used a lot behind the scenes for other purposes.

You just wrote it is a little site for a niche topic. What you call widespread is not nearly as widespread as you think it is.

@captainmuon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683845) didn't say it was widespread in any absolute sense, only that he or she was surprised by how widespread it was.

This is the crux, isn't it? We might even say it was dead when they named it RSS. That wasn't consumer friendly enough.

The general idea was certainly sound. But as much as publishers offered it they were never comfortable (read: in favor of) so much of their contented being consimed without a visit, or at the very least without any analytics. Total feed subscribers just wasn't good enough.

Users shouldn't have needed to know the name. They should have just seen the logo, clicked it, and been magically subscribed through whatever their reader of choice is. In most cases that is and was how it worked... works.

The problem was always getting users on board with it. From inception the kind of person that would struggle to use RSS and lead to its eventual downfall was using webmail and thought their browser was the entire PC besides Solitare back in the early 2000s. For them, getting some arcane "where should we open this link" when you clicked a subscribe button with the RSS logo completely shut them down. I'm not sure if Firefox's "live bookmarks" ever worked intuitively.

Add on to that I'm not sure if IE or Safari ever supported RSS, had a reader, or anything of the ilk and it was DOA. The remotely informed user would have just used Google Reader, but there was no mechanism (and I don't think there even is one today?) to transparently feed RSS links into a webapp reader.

I know at at least one point Firefox was defaulting RSS to Google Reader, but I don't think IE or Safari ever did, and that was at least 60% of the browser market at the time not providing a usable experience for a syndication format. Thats how it ends up dead on arrival.

IE had a reader (introduced in IE7 I think). There was some sort of support in Outlook as well.

RSS feeds still in Outlook, but it's the first feature I disable.

Don't need unused folders in my mail directory trees.

> "Users shouldn't have needed to know the name."

How would they communicate with each other about it then? These things don't expand in a vacuum. Perhaps not in a modern social media sense, but there is always a network effect.

Calling it RSS was too plain and too clinical.

This is the elephant in the room here. With google reader, they actually had a good integration with google buzz so that I could have a small social circle around some posts. I could put a comment on an RSS item and my friends and I could have a conversation on it.

Then, they killed it hoping to get everyone discussing things in a plus feed. Something I have no interest in. Especially because I can't really see the discussions in my email.

Which is ultimately what is killing things here. Many of us built up real workflows for correspondence using email. It works great for that. Instead of trying to help build on these correspondence workflows, companies would rather find ways of owning that correspondence, such that now I have to use Facebook or Google Plus or whatever in order to have basic back and forths with friends/family/strangers.

Agreed. That said the typical email UI could easily become an RSS reader.

- Sender = publisher / source - Subject = title + author - Body = body

The same can be said for SMS.

Shifting the email client to a one-stop comms dashboard would make a lot of sense (to me). Add in drag & drop to a TODO list(s) and I'm more effective and happier.

Have you any idea how popular podcasts are these days?

This saddens me as I didn't have much need for RSS when Google Reader was around. Currently my news apps keep "learning" what I like and have become increasingly useless so I signed up for Feedly to create a less filtered feed of things I actually am interested in. The RSS support in Firefox has been great in helping me find feeds to add.

> the average user was never able to make any sense of it.

By that metric, Bitcoin is also dead.

There are multiple for-profit RSS reader services. I follow a really unreasonable number of webcomics, and I've seen one, ever, that didn't have an RSS feed. "Niche audience" is not the same as "dead".

(I've honestly never understood why people find RSS so confusing. You sign up to Feedly or whatever, and you choose creators you want to follow. It's not dramatically different than getting started on Twitter.)

I keenly remember how 80% of websites wouldn't render properly in Firefox because they were all designed for IE6. You had no choice but to replicate the rendering bugs in IE6 if you wanted webpages to look good. But Firefox refused. They just focused on making an awesome browser, even if it wasn't appreciated. Even if users mistakenly blamed Firefox for webpages not rendering properly.

10 years ago Firefox flagrantly disregarded the "standards" of the day set out by Microsoft and Adobe, and instead made their own vision of what they thought the web should be, even if it was obscure and "unpopular". And even if it never caught on, and Microsoft had dominated, Firefox (then Firebird) would STILL have been awesome.

They quietly introduced RSS support, because it was a good feature for the browser to have, regardless of how many people use it. That's how I first learned about RSS. I loved Firefox and thought it was awesome that they were giving me access to this new feature.

That was back when adding new features was considered progress, instead of what we have now.

> But Firefox refused.

This isn't quite true.

Firefox refused to do some things (explicitly violating some standards to fix some kinds of cosmetic issues, adding some APIs that seemed bad for users and the web). Firefox definitely did a bunch of other things to improve compat, including implementing various nonstandard IE6 features (XMLHttpRequest comes to mind!), matching IE6 rendering in various cases (see limited-quirks mode), etc, etc.

[Disclaimer: I was working on Firefox back then, and still am now; I've had to deal with a _lot_ of this firsthand.]

> [Disclaimer: I was working on Firefox back then, and still am now; I've had to deal with a _lot_ of this firsthand.]

I remember knowing you from UC and being surprised—I think when I saw your name in a changelog, perhaps—that someone I knew by chance was a part of the architecture of a project I loved (and love, albeit less passionately) so much. Thank you for your work!

You're welcome!

You're right, they did have to make some compromises. But they also stood firm against some of the more egregious standards that Microsoft were trying to push.

Of course if Mozilla back then were like it is today, they would have been begging for donations so that they could support Microsoft Janus or RealPlayer or whatever garbage they were trying to impose on users back then, all so that their browser could be a second class citizen in the DRM ecosystem. It was really nice while it lasted, to have an organization that stood in opposition and provided an alternative to the commercialization of web technologies.

> But they also stood firm against some of the more egregious standards that Microsoft were trying to push.

Can you give a specific example?

I'm not saying this wasn't happening; I just can't recall a case where it really mattered much in the end, in the sense that the standard was being pushed by Microsoft _and_ wanted by web developers, but active Firefox opposition killed it.

Now Firefox certainly _has_ done some things like that (e.g. pushing back on NaCl), but mostly by offering alternatives, not pushing back with just a "no". Because just saying "no" doesn't actually work that well in practice...

I have tons of scripts that use RSS feeds, I don't know what you are talking about. I even use Feed43[0] to generate RSS feeds for sites with no RSS.

[0]: https://feed43.com/

Users could make sense of it, but advertisers couldn't capitalize on it to shove ads at your eyeballs.

what I noticed as stabbing rss in the back was Google embracing and then eventually extinguishing Reader.

Bingo. It's not driving revenue, it drives quality content (or at least click bait titles but that's going to be there regardless), so it has to go. Thankfully WordPress will keep this alive, it's probably a more significant factor behind RSS adoption than any browser.

Perhaps RSS wasn't built for the average user.

I follow 561 RSS feeds on feedly.com. Pretty much every site I care about provides an RSS feed, and adding one is not that hard (one site even added one today, on my request).

So, I don’t agree that RSS is dead.

Yup. Once you look at all web browsers including desktop and mobile, Firefox has 5-6% marketshare. I am also super disappointed, see my multiple comments in this thread. I've often promoted FF to others based on this simple, amazing feature. Many times, even here on HN if you read my post history[0][1][2]. See reference [0], 3 years ago mentioning to never kill this feature.

By Mozilla's own logic given in their bugtracker comments and 5% marketshare, Mozilla may as well not even exist and delete all the Firefox code.

They just want to push Pocket and other alternatives that they think they can monetize easier than free and open standards like RSS. This is blatantly against Mozilla's code.

It's time to find a new browser, and I've long been a fan of native browsers for their native optimizations that result in lower power usage. Considering I rarely have my computer even powered on without a browser open, Edge and Safari simply make more sense now that FF only has container support & a dedicated search bar to lure me in.

With Windows 10 Sets likely only to work properly with Edge, and Netflix only supporting 1080P & 4K in Edge, and being optimized for my system's best interests.. MS has more convincing features than Firefox. Firefox was always the (only) browser optimized for my personal best interests, through privacy & features.

Safari, same thing as Edge. Only way to get 1080P Netflix on macOS, supports all the Apple integration features like ApplePay payment support with TouchID, picture-in-picture support for Youtube, and better battery life.

It's a shame what Mozilla has become post-Brandon Eich. They're just chasing nonsense now with Pocket.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11033694#11033837

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15694926#15700267

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16721690#16722005 "It's time to head back to RSS? (wired.com)"

> It's time to find a new browser

KDE browser: https://www.falkon.org/about/

rss is already dead, its just weeding out unused parts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com