Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
gijsk.com
gijsk.com
(I was one of the creators of RSS).
My current company, Datastreamer:
Provides social media data streams for companies and search engines wanting full torrents of web content.
We deprecated RSS a LONG time ago, which was for me, like abandoning your baby.
I think RSS is dead in many ways but it's also still around in a sense.
Mostly because of Twitter and Facebook metadata. You can accomplish 90% of what you want with RSS just by parsing the metadata on an HTML page.
Because we've added NLP and content extraction algorithms on top of the content we're able to re-construct feeds that are better than the original RSS.
With another app I'm working on:
I might actually use something similar to build in data feeds similar to a feed reader.
But man.. I can't believe I'm thinking about building in a feed reader again :-P
Also, what is your pricing like? I understand you can’t give details, but are we talking a few hundred a month? A few thousand?
Thanks!
Shout-out to one of those niche sources, for example:
Open to other great niche sources.
Keep circling!
I am not sure you can. Metadata is quite inconsistent and many websites that I have the RSS feed for block crawlers and scrapers. Advantages of RSS are common standard and design to be consumed by a bot. What we've got instead are curated fb and twitter feeds that people get hooked on and never look back. Openness is the aspect of RSS that I'll miss the most.
I think that's the hard part. Some content providers put out content way quicker than a human could ever keep up with. I wrote a web crawler once to download high resolution pictures of cars from a Russian website at a quick but modest pace and I got IP banned within a couple hours.
For a business (which what I'm thinking in terms of), $500/mo for 100 IP addresses which you can trivially cycle by destroying and creating new virts is well within cost. For an individual, I assume you wouldn't be crawling 24/7, so bring up as many as needed for short bursts. At $0.007/hr, you could bring up 100 from a snapshot/template, use them for a few hours to crawl whatever you need, and it will cost you just over $2.[1] For longer term but smaller needs, just spin up 5-10 for $25-$50/mo cost.
1: 100 * $0.007/hr * 3 hours = $2.10
DO data is cheaper, but not free, and I'm not sure if they charge for changing IP addresses a lot.
Not to mention that in many cases, admins start blocking while up ranges. And due to scraping, lots of sites block popular ip ranges like that of AWS. There are actually forums where people keep updated ranges for the different cloud platforms.
This was a long time ago, and I don't remember what it cost, and there was a limit. It was certainly cheaper than having multiple EC2s just for their IPs though.
That said, if Firefox hadn't hidden live bookmarks away several years ago they might see more use. The small subset of users who bothered to look for them and bring them back to the toolbar might even overlike the set of users who disable telemetry, too.
Part of the solution is this sort of A.I.
http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/
but trained by you and not some other person who is training it to control your behavior.
It goes into some detail about the various RSS incompatibilities and is well worth the read, because RSS never really got any better even afterwards.
I think that's the kind of thing that burtonator was referring to.
Boom, spot on. Being able to create Anki flashcards while you are reading new content is pretty cool, and much more useful than the whole 'non-linear reading progress' (most documents are meant to be read linearly, and my PDF reader opens a file at the position I closed it).
Now I will check it out ;-)
I currently use it mostly for the "post to hn" function and as rss reader ofc :p
It just needs some curation and the example I'm showing is more for testing with "more than average data" -> http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest
Ps. Rss is good enough, just like SQL is good enough untill you hit the limits
Actually today I thought about transforming schema org data to rss depending on the configuration ( eg. price changes), which seems to be what you are doing ( sort of)
Very few end users can parse the metadata on an HTML page, and of those who can do it, few have time to do it for every page they'd like to 'subscribe to'.
sounds like your saying a site has to use Facebook and Twitter if they want to achieve the same thing as an rss feed.
how is having two for profit companies who record ever click be the gateway to a feed the right solution?
I'm the last person to want to begrudge making a profit, but the move away from RSS is a blatant, deliberate move away from openness/user control and toward walled gardens. And ever since Twitter dropped RSS, I realized I'd rather do without the sites entirely than do without their feeds.
Meanwhile, huge swathes of the internet still use RSS and Atom or even the age-old approach of mailing lists. (And readers like Feedbin gives you an address to provide to mailing lists so you can follow those just like any other feed.) Every time I see someone say RSS is dead, I go and look at my unread article count.
Worse: a site has to scrape FB and TWTR to achieve the same thing.
I'm baffled how anybody who even knows what page-scraping is could think of it as an improvement over RSS.
Filters (never see topics or even entire sites, you don't want to); mark-as-read (never rescan, HUGE time saver); single place to monitor multiple sources; standard. All these things make RSS far superior to any subscribe/follow systems I've seen anywhere else. I know RSS was supposed to be about the content too, but just as a notification system, it's crushes anything else out there. Some sites still include the content, but obviously you can't get that from aggregate and multimedia sites. RSS still provides a better way to consume the general web, even if most people don't realize it. Thank you for your work.
The sad truth is that RSS is a product designed for an internet that doesn't really exist anymore (blogosphere on top of the open web). The reason everyone is dropping support for RSS is because not enough people are using it.
Besides the consumers not using it anymore you also see producers moving behind paywalls or pushing people to their website so they can click ads (media), and everyone else uses a few closed platforms (twitter, facebook).
EDIT: I personally would choose an RSS feed over Facebook's newsfeed any day of the week. Including having to go through the hassle of keeping my subscriptions up to date and going out of my way to find new sources. Unfortunately the reality is that mass consumers don't agree and FB has over 2 billion users whereas RSS readers are dropping left and right because no one is using them.
Every site I've cared to "subscribe" to has an RSS feed somewhere, so that end of things is still alive and well. I don't see any reason for them to stop either, I still end up at their site (assuming they only publish links) and that's all they can hope for.
This is the most effective way to consume content. It's not dead and won't be until more effective one.
Is it shrinking? My podcast apps use RSS feeds to locate episodes. Debian uses sourceforge's RSS feeds to locate updated sources. A published, chronological list of events or things is not an uncommon thing to want, and as the parent said unless something better comes along RSS/Atom is it.
To come full circle figuratively means to be back where you started. What you meant to say is that you've done a 180 (a U-turn) on the idea.
I think it is a curious thing that even though all major browsers are written and built by geeks their corporate entities have ditched a tech that geeks are very vocal about liking.
Google famously killed Google Reader, a much loved product. That decision made me for the first time look at Google in a different light (when Reader was around I practically lived in Reader – this is perhaps what Google didn't like, I know it's a paranoid/conspiratorial viewpoint but …) [0]
Microsoft killed RSS support when moving from IE to Edge. [1]
Apple removed RSS support from Safari in Mountain Lion only to add it back in half-heartedly in Yosemite but I don't know enough about the MacOS/iOS platform to say for certain where its support is at. [2]
And today – champion of the open web, Mozilla – kills support a short while after acquiring Pocket, a non-open feature of their browser that for most people sits uselessly on the toolbar taking up valuable screen real estate and also bloats the code-base.
That's all of them then. So what's up? Why is it that browser creators don't want us to consume content in an open, uniform and standard way using RSS when it works fine and clearly geek like consuming content that way? What's so awful about: “I like that site (or sub-site), please subscribe to it and notify me about new content.”? Anybody who has any inside info on this topic please let us know.
I think it mirrors why large tech companies have failed to deliver open and federated social media. From now on, given that Chromium is also open source, I know longer consider Mozilla to be the champion of the open web. Not if they kill useful open standards and don't champion other ones even if it's not popular. Freedom has never been about popularity. Firefox should have been the first browser ages ago to ship with a built in ad-blocking and anti-tracking tech but they never did. Why? I thought Persona was pretty cool tech, but nope, they had to shut it down. And Firefox Hello? D.O.A. In certain optics it looks like Mozilla only exist to enrich themselves and not rock the ecosystem too much.
[0] “ Google Reader shutting down
1926 points knurdle 6 years ago 704 comments (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cl...) “
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371725 (I have rarely seen such a uniform outcry on HN)
[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_in...
I think his use of the expression is accurate—coming full circle to HTML—not to RSS. There would have been no need for the commenter to co-create RSS if HTML had been adequate for what they were trying to achieve at that time.
In other words, HTML's poor fit for content syndication as the web was growing paved way for the creation of RSS. Now, people merely use HTML meta elements to achieve most of what RSS was designed for.
I know this much, if RSS was easier to monetize. Firefox wouldn't have any problems maintaining it on their browser.
>if RSS was easier to monetize
There's no problems with monetizing RSS feeds. It's just a notification system.
That is to say, what Firefox and Datastreamer are deciding about RSS appears to be unrelated. However, as a cocreator of RSS, you probably know that HTML -- which is the source of "metadata" for you -- is hard to parse correctly. Much harder and error-prone than parsing XML for RSS. Your solution serves only to push complexity downstream.
Providing RSS feeds is practically free everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if many more resources are spent deciding to turn it off than feeds would consume for all eternity.
Because Mozilla owns Pocket
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
I don't know how many use Pocket but I would be shocked it it wasn't far higher.
I'm using feedbro now.
Live bookmarks never worked very well, now did it?
What percentage of people complaining about this are actually using the RSS support in FF itself at this moment?
Maybe they really are independent, but there's no way to tell and Mozilla's past transparency failures (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956325#15956653) haven't earned them the benefit of the doubt.
What does that have to do with independence and transparency?
It was a marketing stunt performed in partnership with a television show and was installed without the user's knowledge or consent.
> It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag.
It destroyed a lot of trust. Seriously. I too was really confused when I suddenly saw an extension I never installed. (This could happen before when desktop installers could add extensions but I don't think they can anymore so I was properly confused until K searched for it on the Internet.)
> It was not advertising. It was an easter egg.
Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
The thing is, Mozilla has always had the ability to put arbitrary things into firefox, and it's always had easter eggs in it. The way they did it was a big mistake but from my point of view only because it was scary-looking (and showed their extension pipeline had issues, I guess), not because of what it actually did.
> Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
How about this: It wasn't there to advertise to anyone that didn't already know about it.
- but it seems we mostly agree on this.
I still don't have any problems with easter eggs. Give me back my whimsy.
I mean: I too like whimsy, and adding an about:<something noncommercial> would probably be ok with me. (In fact I think there was an easter egg on some about:-protocol-page st some point.)
It was just the sudden surprise of seing an extension I didn't expect and then what at least felt like a hidden commercial motive on top of that.
Maybe it's the jarring worlds of security! paranoia! Absolute Control! vs. the FF wants to fun! unpredictable! Think different (no wait, that slogan's tainted now...)!
Given the way they present the extensions... it - in retrospect - should have been clear to them it would trigger more initial reactions from the first set of perspectives, and not just the second.
You calling this an easter egg had me confused as to what the hell this thread was about, searching for "firefox easter egg" shows nothing about it.
You could see the existence of the extension because of poor decisions.
But it didn't turn on unless you went into about:config and manually flipped "extensions.pug.lookingglass" to true.
Definitely intended as an easter egg. Even of the people getting upset about the visible extension, 99+% of them never saw the enabled effect.
The analogy applies to computing in 2 ways: they're hidden, and it's something desirable. Niether of those ways apply to what Mozilla did. Therefore it wasn't an easter egg and you trying to pretend otherwise is just confusing.
They made a mistake in deployment that turned it into a scary mysterious blob. That's bad, but doesn't change the underlying nature of the code.
We can agree that the exact same code in C, not showing up in any lists or menus, not triggering without a magic about:config phrase, would be a clear easter egg, right?
(Also easter eggs don't inherently have to be fun, sometimes they're just someone's initials.)
(Completely disable Pocket integration in Firefox, the browser. Not Mozilla, the company.)
People actually use Pocket.
You know a lot of people who use the RSS feature being removed from Firefox? Not RSS, but the feature. Because you didn't say anything about he feature, but RSS in general. I use RSS. I didn't use the feature in Firefox.
Pocket:RSS::allowance:salary.
I feel like we're entering a period when a browser shakeup is in order.
Chrome is spyware. Safari is usually an implementation laggard. Firefox makes a seemingly endless stream of stupid, annoying choices. (Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now.)
Seems like it is time, again, for something that sucks less.
Edge. It somehow manages to be worse than IE in many circumstances (including being used to view Microsoft's own websites).
I use pocket; it's better than nothing. Also: if it weren't for pocket, FF would have some difficulty competing with Googles suggestions, which are pretty OK, really, and definitely enough to keep me occasionally entertained - and without killer feature to beat chrome, why pick FF over chrome at all?
(Some context: I used to use chrome precisely for that reason, and recently switched back because the suggestion feature appears to work less well now, and FF's version is good enough).
I hope the browser will still suggest feed-reading extensions when users land on feeds. Not doing that would be shady.
1) My employer has disabled the button in firefox. I can work around this by signing in in any browser but there is something weird that happens. I think I have to allow all kinds of google javascript spyware to run some kind of captcha to be able to sign in.
2) The saved links do not refer to the original sites I've saved. They are some kind of click-through tracking spyware.
Also the tagging feature seems hard to use. As I recall it seemed difficult to filter using multiple tags.
If it was more like Delicious I'd be happy with it.
So it goes like this:
1. Firefox adds integration with a commercial, closed source service (Pocket)
2. People get up in arms about it
3. Mozilla issues some specially crafted statements about the relationship with Pocket (the decision to ship Pocket "has absolutely nothing to do with money"—it's only shipping because Firefox PMs like Pocket); so even if they are receiving kickbacks, this can arguably still be true, but it's widely understood to mean that there's no money changing hands
4. Mozilla's own employees who were taken in by the PR begin showing up in conversations thereafter and explicitly saying there's no money changing hands—because they don't know any more than what everyone else was told in #3
5. It's later revealed that there has, in fact, been a revenue sharing agreement with Pocket, contra claims otherwise
6. It's reported that Mozilla is finally just going to acquire Pocket, and it will become open source
7. Concerns are abated; people move on
8. There is no #8. The open source thing was never true. Pocket remains about as open source as it was before the acquisition.
I support Mozilla's mission, which is why I hate Pocket. It's not just obnoxious — it goes against everything Mozilla is supposed to stand for.
all that said, I learned just now that firefox had RSS/ATOM support. Public open standard feeds should never die, but how was this in-browser feature ever useful?
So in this case, the criticism comes down to: I don't like Pocket, and it's centralised. Which I don't think is very strong; the exact same point could be made about Firefox Sync: "they're pushing a bloated built-in centralised service that is very difficult to turn off entirely". Technically true, but really not a compelling argument to remove it or to make it easy to remove all mentions of Firefox Sync from the interface.
Go to `about:config`, search for `extensions.pocket.enabled` and switch to `false`.
Not as good as uninstalling, but at least disabling is possible.
AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/
GitHub: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief
It also includes a `Page action` so that an RSS icon is shown in the address bar on sites that support RSS/Atom. Great for discovery.
Edit: Really strange, that `Brief` is missing in the curated list of readers that mozilla is linking to from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement... as alternative: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mozilla... (This looks like a really poor list) I've seen `Brief` recommended all the time by users. I don't really mind that Firefox removes its RSS support: It was missing many features anyway and had a really poor UX.
I was a long time user of Brief but moved away during the transition to webextensions. Although Brief worked there were some performance issues at the time (maybe solved now?). Both provide a similar user experience, and are the two best RSS readers I used so far.
Brief is atrocious-looking out of the box, but you can enter your own CSS to override the styling. I've been pretty happy with it for the last few years.
I'm currently using a feed reader installed on my web server so that I can access and sync my feeds between all my devices (home computer, work computer and smartphone). I use Firefox on all of my devices. Do you know if there is a way to sync the Brief database on different devices to keep them in sync?
Bonus: for feeds that provide just the headline and an intro paragraph, it has Mercury Reader built-in, which allows you to access the entire article without leaving Reeder.
To my mind, it kinda defeats the purpose of having the feed, since I could just as easily scroll the front page of the site.
Was it the intention of RSS from the outset that your feed would only provide a "preview" of the article, or was the hope that you would get the full body of the text?
(Clickbait itself is an example of that. You absolutely can get to the point in the title. But most media sources don't, because it's not their goal to inform you - their goal is to just exploit you for all they can.
Similarly unfriendly is assuming bad faith, i. e. "most media sources don't [seek to] inform you - their goal is to just exploit you".
Yeah, yeah, I know. You'd gladly spoil the writers you read by deigning to visit, if only they didn't use javascript/have big images that load slowly/used your favorite font/...
It’s amazing what you can do if you stay small and have “1000 true fans”.
It's kind of a useful data point, and I could imagine the controversy if RSS services made an attempt to share more.
I miss it dearly.
> because the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium for most content
Huh, you must use RSS for different things than I do. The blogs I follow via RSS work fine, and I only go to the site for comments on some of them. The podcasts and tumblr posts work much better in their respective readers than visiting any website.
Much more infuriating is that the various “Reader Modes” in browsers and e.g. Pocket sometimes not only tends to omit images, but even whole paragraphs of the text. It’s hard to notice that you missed a paragraph that you don’t know existed, so I don’t trust them anymore. I believe that should be less of an issue in RSS, since it of course includes the text to be displayed in the feed. Still, since I cannot be sure that authors take full attention to their RSS feeds, I prefer reading them on the website just in case some other formatting quirk messes things up.
Stuff like info boxes or illustrations might not even be part of the main body.
In that way, I actually prefer it when the RSS feed just contains a meaningful preview. Though I guess the correct solution would be to include both a preview and the full article, designated as such in the structure.
Another third are recipes, which include so much extraneous backstory and contextual pictures that they're obnoxious to navigate in a nested panel of another website. It's easier to scroll ~2/3 down the page to get to the recipe on the actual webpage than in the reader. This is arguably a complaint about the specific presentation in my reader.
> And including the article body preserves both options as a choice.
Certainly. I don't want to impose my preference on the RSS ecosystem, I'm just expressing a different point of view.
My choice of reader is certainly my intended presentation medium.
That’s cool, but don’t wonder then if important details are missing.
It's close enough. I use reader view on any post on a website that's even slightly annoying to look at.
It would be nice if content and presentation were sufficiently separated as initially imagined, but I don’t believe that to be current reality.
For how many sites? I much prefer having a consolidated list of new content than clicking on a hundred bookmarks, waiting for the page to load, then scanning to see if anything is different.
There probably are done folks with great intents, but there's legitimate reasons to channel people to your site as well.
1: I highly recommend NewsBlur. I went through a few readers over a couple years after Google Reader shut down, and settled on NewBlur, and actually pay for it.
For instance, I know quite a few forums have RSS import functions, and quite a few CMS systems are set up to auto import content from an RSS feed (like say, an associated forum).
In those cases, the system sometimes doesn't let the user customise the output of the RSS importer, but does let them set what content is in the RSS file. So admins will provide a preview so their forum doesn't end up with the entire article or vice versa.
This is definitely annoying, but the nice thing about RSS (and ATOM) is that it's machine readable, so post-processors can follow the link (e.g. using wget) and insert the page content into the feed.
Here's a script I use to postprocess BBC news RSS feeds: https://github.com/Warbo/warbo-utilities/blob/master/raw/get...
(Looks complicated, but mostly deals with stipping side bars, navigation menus, etc. from the page, rendering the HTML to plain text, and also includes test cases; the RSS code is mostly copy/pasted from tutorials)
It’s awesome, open source, self hostable, freemium if you don’t self host, has mobile and desktop apps if you care.
Not affiliated, just a very satisfied paying customer.
I wrote an open source one for Firefox here: http://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
It's certainly not the only option though, so try a few things.
And removing this feature - like the missing feed detection in the UI - is what indeed can kills RSS, as it makes RSS inaccessible to users. Unlike the feed reader itself this can not be solved by webextensions.
Also I don't agree that this necessarily can't be done a webextension. For instance you can have add-ons like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/ so I assume the same would be true for RSS
- the built-in feed preview feature
- the "live bookmarks" support
- the subscription UI
They give justifications for removing the first two, but not the third.
Assuming by "subscription UI" they mean the support for following a link to an RSS feed and being given the option to send the URL to my preferred online feed reader, I think that's a great shame.
Making it worse, that article says "that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons", with a link to what they say is a curated collection of readers, but none of the add-ons in that collection seem to replace the old subscription UI.
> feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.
I'm curious the source of this data, seeing as I've switched to Firefox due to privacy concerns.
I hope they wouldn't consider removing the option to select which application to use to open a particular file type, or to install an add-on, based on the percentage of sessions which use it.
Edit: I just found out that you can look at the collected data at about:telemetry
It's required. No way around that.
On the other hand, or hay, Firefox Screenshots!! Sooo useful. Pocket? It doesn't get more federated than that! Or the dozen of DOM APIs added every year, which are probably much more complicated to maintain than a simple RSS preview feature.
I really hate the general direction of how browsers are developed.
I've hated it for a while, especially as browsers move more and more away from "browsing" and become more and more of a half-ass "universal application runtime" combined with "something kinda like an X-server but not really".
I kinda think we need to split browsers so they support two "modes": content mode, and application mode (or something like that) where the core functionality of the browser is rendering HTML content and, well, browsing. But a given page should be able to signal (through a meta tag or an HTTP header or something) "I'm an application" where it gets run as an application... which could still mean running in the browser as JS, or it could mean handing the thing off to a content handler to run the application outside of the browser. In my vision, the difference between "application mode" and "content mode" would be things like: in "application mode" all keybindings would pass through to the application, so you could - for example - use F1 for context sensitive help, instead of F1 triggering the browser's help menu. Also, app mode could allow things like altering the right-click context menu, while content mode might disable that. Etc. etc.
When browsing documents, I don't want application cruft (I probably don't want JavaScript). I really don't want "application" features getting abused by adverts.
For our SPA we have needs that are not related to documents (restricting the viewport zoom, fixed toolbars at top and bottom, preferably hide browser URL and toolbars). Heaps of modern browser functionality such as WebWorkers and notifications is only really relevant to web apps.
Yeah, exactly. A given page should be able to request "application mode" and the user should be able to say "OK" or "NO", or just navigate away if they don't want an "application" doing stuff.
For our SPA we have needs that are not related to documents (restricting the viewport zoom, fixed toolbars at top and bottom, preferably hide browser URL and toolbars). Heaps of modern browser functionality such as WebWorkers and notifications is only really relevant to web apps.
Yep, yep. Glad I'm not the only one who agrees with this. I've been thinking about floating this idea for a while, but I kinda figured everybody would just say "that's stupid". :-)
Except it won't happen, because users and publishers have conflicting interests in this. I refer to it as war over control over presentation. This is why publishers say that ad-blocking is wrong (they assume it's their right to tell you exactly how you should consume content). This is why you get DRM. This is part of the reason why Flash used to be popular with companies. This is why RSS is not. I believe that if given a chance, most companies would gladly send you their webpages as opaque .exe files. We just got lucky that the Web, down to HTTP protocol itself, was initially designed to give users most of control.
I don't know of a solution. I know we can try to win battles, by building and proposing software that lets more people exercise more control over their browsers. Unfortunately, I feel that organizations responsible for the Web - the consortia and browser vendors - are all fighting on the side of publishers now. Browsers are starting to function less as User Agents, and more as remote terminals.
Yeah, that's a real problem for sure.
Browsers are starting to function less as User Agents, and more as remote terminals.
I know, I've been railing against this for probably 8 or 9 years now... with little to show for it, unfortunately. Probably for the reasons you just cited. sigh
The only winning condition is to deal with people who are willing to exchange information. FOSS, Wikipedia are projects based on this model. They have shown that throwing contributors at the problem can achieve decent results.
Part of the solution is to use a distributed file system for this, so that users who don't contribute to the content however support hosting and transmission costs directly and automatically.
We don't need yet another commercial or non-profit social network. We need non-commercial contribution networks.
This is exactly why "mobile app" versions of webpages (facebook, reddit, you name it) are so prevalent. Of course it's also why I would never use them under any circumstance.
I like the way you put it, "war over control over presentation". It hits the nail on the head and it describes something that has been happening for a long, long time.
I would happily go back to flash. However bad flash was, it was at least external to the browser. I could turn it off globally and things would get much lighter and memory would be freed up. All we have done with html5 is integrate the shitty functionality into the core of our browser.
The one thing that Mozilla had to do was not normalize this crap, and they wouldn't do it because they weren't hip enough or something.
Publishers don't have as much control as you think. I've seen so many failed experiments in years past. This is our fault. We enabled them to abuse us.
It might also be that the right thing to do is have a fine-grained permission model where pages request specific capabilities from the browser, and the user can allow or deny, with the ability to revoke permissions if abused, or white-list sites in advance, etc.
But when 99% of sites are already using a feature, introducing a permission dialog would just be hell for users, since they'd have to click Allow hundreds of times a day.
True enough. And it does get tiring having to click "no" all the time on those notification dialogs.
But again, this is a very nascent idea. I've spent more time thinking about in the last 20 minutes than I had in aggregate before today. I'm not convinced that there isn't a way to make something like this work, but the details are a bit fuzzy. Of course it's also possible that it's just a dead-end from the start. But it sure feels like there needs to be some way to distinguish "apps" and "regular content" and the way browsers handle each.
Google - for good or ill - was able to push AMP because they have the power to reward the sites that complied. You need something similar.
I would suggest default layouts chosen/optimized for users. Users would be able to view different forms of content based on the website's suggested format, which is stored by default in the browser. This way, online markets/stores/shops and even ad-systems could be designed such that the user would already be able to view such content in a way that makes them want to click. From a business perspective, this means no more need for client-side analytics, no more browser marketing analysis team, no more front-end web designer, no more need to bother users with invading privacy just to get that key little piece of info. That saves tons of money! Heck - without even sending data to the server, the browser could be designed to bring up content most interesting to the user.
As for ads, these could be presented in an appropriate manner, maybe listed in a sidebar, but in any case, in a way that people would prefer viewing them. I don't think people hate ads, but I do think modern ad techniques suck, and most people would be happy to view ads if presented in the right context and in the right way. Why not let the user pick the how?
(In case you're worried about the lost jobs, those people can shift to the app-side of the web.)
(This is the core of the ad blocking issue, BTW.)
Of course I'm an user, I'd love the split between browser and app runtime, even just so that I could not launch the latter much, telling all the sites pretending to be applications to just go to hell.
HTML had been stable since forever, and browsers will render pretty much any old shit you throw at them without too much cajoling. SVG/canvas were the last things to be cleaned up iirc, but they're pretty usable now.
Most of the sharp edges on JS' DOM API implementations were smoothed off ages ago and if you want to use the newest features stuff like babel and typescript transpile es6 back to es5 with selection of polyfills. AFAIK safari still can't round opacity properly, but since that's usually a stylistic thing just use css.
Vendor prefixes in css have been less relevant for a fair while, were easy to use if you wanted to throw some @keyframes down, and are a non issue of you use an auto prefixer of some description.
The only problem browser is IE11, which had some admittedly wacky implementations and out-dates most of the modern frontend stack by several years.
There are still weirdnesses (Firefox's font rendering, literally everything Safari does, features being implemented and deprecated simultaneously) but nothing insurmountable.
The other program would be an application runner with internet capabilities (and permissions settings), tailored more towards heavy-weight applications that need lots of features (like audio editing), but they have to do it manually - no built-in play(audio.ogg) like in the first program.
Of course, there are a number of downsides. Users don't generally want to open separate programs much less download them (unless they're bundled). But the way apps are these days, I don't think people would mind.
All in all, I'd say this had just about zero impact on folks who actually use feeds.
Another favorite quote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision." I'm betting this hurt (though a brief search through the FF mailing lists didn't turn up anything), but it seems like a good strategic decision.
That doesn't apply in this case. Saying no would have meant they never added it to Firefox. They said yes and now they're removing it. I'm not sure who said it, but there's a saying along the lines of "If you force users to change, they go shopping."
Keep in mind that the definition of "great product" depends on the person. For the average user, a product that does what you want and keeps doing it is a great product, and anything else sucks.
I can't help but feel that's a silly quote. There are plenty of strategic decisions that don't hurt (especially choosing between two future directions, neither of which you have sunk costs in) and plenty of decisions which hurt and so you want to justify them as being strategic... when they might just be bad strategic decisions, or bad tactical decisions.
Honestly the quote sounds like what a bad manager says when they make a decision employees are against, when the employees are actually better-informed.
Decisions like this are making Firefox an inferior product. Proxy API are terrible post-Quantum, so there's no decent Proxy switching addon. Tab Groups are gone, existing plugins are way inferior. Every feature they remove is replaced by way inferior workarounds which make browsing a pain.
Mozilla have been making "tough decisions" for the past 3 years but they haven't been able to even create a semblance of a "great product".
I've reinstalled a backup I kept of FF 36 - my entire workflow has slowly been gutted over the years.
1) With FF 41 I could no longer set my New Tab page to my Home Page without an add-on. As of Firefox 57 the add-on became buggy if you regularly and quickly try to { Ctrl+T -> Ctrl+L -> Begin typing URL } due to limitations with the Web Extension API. [0]
2) Lost Tab Groups as of FF 45 (the add-on isn't a full replacement of old functionality)
3) Lost many, many, many addons with FF 57 including a very specific tab management that an addon called FireGestures allowed for: using a context menu to navigate my tabs.
4) Lost Bookmark descriptions with FF 62, also lost the Developer Toolbar
5) Now losing Live Bookmarks with FF 64
I no longer recommend FF as the "power user" browser but as the "I dislike Google and want a good browser that isn't Chrome" browser. If you're a power user of some uncommonly used feature, expect it to be removed at some point. I'd love to see how Pocket usage is measured and the statistics of how many people use that trash that they have shoved down users' throats since FF 38.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...
Enjoy all those security vulnerabilities you've just exposed yourself to.
Outside of vulnerabilities related to web browsing, software vulnerabilities rely on new, untrusted code running on my machine and in many cases the exploits rely on someone having physical access to my machine.
The threat models just aren't all that relevant to me.
The more realistic threat model is software being compromised and the auto-update feature pushing out malicious code to all of the users like what happened with the Transmission BitTorrent Client.
It seems your entire risk computation is based on the premise that this is true, and that if true how much more likely they are to be noticed is significantly high enough to make it less worth the risk.
Do you actually have data to back that up, or are you just going by an assumption? Because to me it seems likely that there are blobs of JS that look for a wide number of vulnerabilities floating around blackhat sites ready to be slightly tweaked for the individual case and then deployed. That's basically the entire premise of what script kiddies are, but with JS, so I don't see why it wouldn't at least be easily available.
> The more realistic threat model is software being compromised and the auto-update feature pushing out malicious code to all of the users like what happened with the Transmission BitTorrent Client.
That's possible. It would still be interesting to see more of the reasoning on this. I can think of a few things that might mitigate what I think you are referring to, but there's not much by the way of details to address.
An assumption. The idea is that conducting more malicious activity is generally easier to spot than conducting less malicious activity and trying a wide range of exploits is more likely to be noticed than a smaller, possibly more targeted exploit. Script kiddies attempt a wide range of exploits when they're going after a single target. For example, throwing any and all known vulnerabilities against a website hoping it is hosted with an outdated version of Wordpress in an attempt to gain access. But unless you're going for attention and de-facing the home page, once you're in you want to draw as little attention to what you're doing as possible. OTOH, they might throw everything and the kitchen sink in under the assumption that they'll be caught quickly so they want to capture as much as possible before they're kicked out.
>...Because to me it seems likely that there are blobs of JS that look for a wide number of vulnerabilities floating around...
I browse with Javascript disabled. I use Tampermonkey and Stylish to inject CSS and Javascript that I write (and therefore trust) to pages I use frequently enough to justify the time spent on restoring certain functionality.
I understand the idea, I just think some assumptions that go into it are wildly unproven. I would think you're just as likely (if not more likely) to be exposed through a high traffic site that is dangerous for a very short period of time than a low traffic site that's exposed for a longer period.
E.g. if nytimes.com is exploited, there's probably a window of minutes to an hour before it's noticed and fixed, and the fix make take as long or longer to happen than the first notification of a problem. In that scenario, the amount of time unnoticed reduced by stacking every exploit you can think of is fairly minimal, and it likely doesn't reduce the time to fix after notification at all.
So, if this assumption any less possible than yours? The only difference is that whether my scenario is right or wrong, it promotes behavior that doesn't leave you more vulnerable to exploitation by random sites, while for yours if you're wrong (and you act on it, as you are) it leaves you more vulnerable.
>>...Because to me it seems likely that there are blobs of JS that look for a wide number of vulnerabilities floating around...
> I browse with Javascript disabled.
Okay, then image library exploits, or css parsing exploits, or any number of other things. For example, ambiguously listed stuff like this[1], or this[2] or this[3] or this[4]... or how about I just point you at a bigger list[5] (code excution exploits for Firefox reversed by date, with severity rating over 9. There are hundreds). It's not like Javascript has been the only attack vector of the last few years. I have no idea how many of these affect that Firefox version. My guess is it's more than two or three.
1: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2016-2807/
2: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2016-2806/
3: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2016-2804/
4: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2016-1945/
5: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...
>OTOH, they might throw everything and the kitchen sink in under the assumption that they'll be caught quickly so they want to capture as much as possible before they're kicked out.
If I felt the risk was large enough to be concerned over - I'd fork and backport the patches and compile a personal version of FF 36 with critical bugs patched. I'll be honest in "possibly execute arbitrary code via unknown vectors" is not one of my highest security concerns and a concerning amount of these are only possible when running Javascript. In fact, the most concerning issues I saw are video codec related. Reading a few of them, they require me to decode/play the video in the browser to trigger so I can probably avoid that by downloading videos to watch locally in a media player instead of through Firefox.
The severity of a bug doesn't matter to me as much as how trivial it is to exploit and how it needs to be exploited.
FWIW I'm still on 52.9.0 on my home PC... (At work I use the latest, it does keep improving, but feels very much 2-steps-forward-1-back when they keep doing stuff like removing long-standing features.) Some of the vulnerabilities that have been fixed in later versions are potentially concerning. I rely a lot on NoScript (pre-Quantum NoScript even detects click-jacking attempts, which post-Quantum doesn't), ad blocking, link un-shorteners, not running Windows/MacOS, and generally not visiting every sketchy site I may be pointed to, but it's still risky -- e.g. a rouge SVG might pwn me one day. I've accepted the risk, for now.
Even as the risk becomes untenable, I worry that as Mozilla continues its war against its users we'll end up in a Windows 10 situation where malware that's actually out there (rather than hypothesized) targeting older versions is generally going to be more respectful of your PC than the software vendor is. A lot of malware probably won't force you to reboot (or restart -- had a wtf moment when I opened a new tab in FF and it couldn't render anything, saying I needed to restart because it had silently updated something), or remove features you use all the time, or constantly nag at your attention about stupid stuff... Ransomware is probably the most user-unfriendly you're likely to get (that impacts your experience, I'm ignoring passive data harvesters that drain your bank account when you're on vacation), but then you have backups, right?
It's not quite that - the context of where the attack is coming from is important.
A site that has been compromised isn't the same threat as visiting an actively (and always) malicious website which isn't the same threat as downloading and opening files which isn't the same threat as downloading new software, installing, and running it.
If I ran Javascript, I'd have a different threat model. If I regularly downloaded files or software, I'd have a different threat model. If I browsed every website I come across like some sort of a web crawler, I'd have a different threat model.
As for new features, nothing that I personally use. Many of these features were removed to pave way for Web Extensions and Quantum and that is justification enough and a direction Firefox needs to move towards if they want to capture the general audience.
They are perfectly fine as a browser-that-isn't-Chrome. But they're no longer a browser for Power Users which is what I feel the roots of FF 2 - FF 4 was like. It was a browser for power users, who wanted control over their browser. Now it's a competitor to/alternative of Chrome that's increasingly being simplified and locked down.
For example, I can't open a new tab to a website I own because setting the new tab page was used maliciously. There's no way to opt out. That's catering to the general population at the detriment to power users. That's all.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing - as iffed as I come off as being.
It's working fine for me after a bit of setup. What issues are you having?
This is an example of what it looked like: https://vgy.me/t2KqD7.png
I use this combined with Tab Groups (Ctrl+Shift+E back in the day) to organize tabs into groups to switch between, then use my List All Tabs to switch between tabs in the groups. The only part of that workflow that still exists is Tab Groups. But you can't use Ctrl+Shift+E because that's now used by the "Network" tab of the Dev Tools.
How I miss that.
The speed at which I could switch tabs, close them, open new links without clicking a button felt like magic.
Hopefully someone will make something like that for a recent FF version.
Just what I was looking for. Missed this functionality so much! Thanks!
In addition, this is offtopic.
It was a partial copy/paste from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197886 which is titled "What happened to my Live Bookmarks?" straight from the horse's mouth. That thread was posted at an awkward time last night and didn't get any discussion. In fact, I was the only one to respond. I try to be transparent when I re-use things I have previously posted, even if I do end up making some pretty significant modifications.
The blog linked in this thread is about the removal of this functionality starting in Firefox 64 from a contributor to Mozilla (Gijs) and a brief history of what the feature actually was and the justifications for removing it. I expand upon this feature removal by speaking of previous feature removals that have occurred over the years. I seem to have an uncanny ability of being part of the 0.01% of users who use these poorly (and often never) advertised features. While it is not directly related to the Live Bookmarks it is in relation to Firefox and Feature Removal.
The discussion about vulnerabilities of using FF 36 that branched off is admittingly off topic - so if you're pruning this thread as a way to kill that conversation then it's less an action of questionable moderation and more a case of poorly worded moderation.
Here's the direct link to the internal doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIMPZVy33mn34pXBUETk4lt_...
And what percentage of Firefox users would pay attention to an announcement like that? Maybe this is the right decision, but they need to be careful.
« Additionally, we are working on various initiatives that operate in the same area of focus as RSS/Atom feed support, like Pocket [...] »
Removing Live Bookmarks is fine. But why get rid of the RSS auto-detection? It's a good advertisement for an immensely useful open technology.
Also... RSS is out and Pocket is in? Ironic.
I thought Mozilla was the one fighting for the open web? Well go fuck yourself Mozilla - that's what I'm feeling right now.
- I can follow many site I like, instead of using an aggregator I do not own nor control;
- I can read posts/articles/listen podcasts without crappy webui full of advertisements;
- I can KEEP posts I'm interest in as long as I want, offline, indexed, tagged in my personal maildir taxonomy;
I still have to find an alternative for that. Usenet of course was a far better way to follow news, ask questions etc, but unfortunately people do not know it anymore... Any modern "feed reader"/"podcatcher" I found, except elfeed are crappy, buggy, unuseful ridiculous apps that try to mimic aggregators instead of focusing on contents.
In the past I keep them separated but manage them, especially store&search with full-post locally saved in case it disappear from their origin it was hard or ineffective.
Actual trend is suppress anything free and not fully controllable: usenet is decentralized and no one can really own it so it's pushed as much as possible to the oblivion, offering colorful and limited substitute from StackExchange to Reddit passing through HN and /., same for mail, they are not distributed but still decentralized enough to be out of complete control, so here came webmails just to avoid people keep their messages locally and paving the way to new "email substitute" that are web-only, fully centralized etc, Slack, Google wave etc are all tentative to bury emails in the past. Webcrap is the same, instead of a WWW of hypertexts. Push of mobile instead of PCs is the same.
Also with these kind of "modern" solution we as clients can't really discuss, try HN, try Disqus we do not really have control and voice, we are only data producer to be milked.
There are fewer, but not exactly "very, very few": http://top1000.anthologeek.net/
Because Usenet is fully distributed, the high number of site-local servers in the past was in large part about reducing bandwidth costs (having a Usenet server on your network is a lot like having a caching proxy, but even more effective).
Running your own text groups Usenet server has also never been cheaper. Most small Usenet server operators will be happy to peer with you, as long as you have a static IP.
The market for binary newsgroup providers is also healthy, but that is not about discussions anymore.
Just last month I launched a bipartisan political news aggregator to force us out of our filter bubbles[1]. The only way I was able to do that was by consuming the politics RSS feeds for both right-leaning and left-leaning news websites.
Without RSS, it's much harder to build an aggregator like this.
Next thing is websites will start removing rss, which means it will be harder for me to scrape them.
I've noticed my RSS content is scraped which makes gives me additional users. Removing RSS would hurt my website.
Personally, I think RSS was one of the crowning achievements of the web. So much so that I attempted to make a little tool to 'create' RSS feeds out of websites that I want to track: http://diyrss.info/u/meesles (the view for a logged-in user shows when new content is available to read)
But again, this isn't sustainable. Any content site depending on revenue would rather users visit their site every 2 hours for content updates than use a third party like Feedly or DIYRSS. I think the solution lies in a fundamentally different revenue model for content, at least for smaller providers.
How so? I think RSS increases advertising and tracking in actual usage of rss readers. When I want to read the article I actually have to open the webpage. The RSS feed normally gives you a headline and if your lucky the first paragraph. So I am going directly to the source when I use RSS. When I use Google News or Facebook I am going to a lot fewer websites.
Some of us just want more control without flashiness, in an organized but flexible way, in how we consume content, and RSS + a good reader is perfect for it.
I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it.
One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.
Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of.
If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).
As long as Firefox can still render feeds I don't care if they take out the bits to manage subscriptions to third party services. That seems like fluff to me.
I think most people who use RSS use native readers or, at the least, some 'cloud' reader. Not too many people need their browser to handle it explicitly.
Next time I do a weekend hackathon I want to create something that helps people like us share OPML files. All the RSS directories I've tried have been pretty subpar. The feedly directory is good, I just wish I could export the WHOLE directory as OPML (I wonder if someone's already done this)
Moving RSS/Atom into webextensions is probably the right decision if you want a small, focused browser that does what it does well and that allows the community to innovate on top of it. And I want that.
So I should be happy, but Firefox overall doesn't seem to necessarily be moving in that direction. Like, I still don't really get why we have Pocket integration. So now I don't know.
It's a good decision that's maybe being made for the wrong reasons, and that may have bad side effects.
The feature as it was didn't work very well, and they obviously weren't going to improve it. So maybe it's for the best that they remove it.
See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
Couldn't an XSLT + XSL stylesheet achive most of what the preview function would continue to be useful for?
Probably it suffices to use regular CSS after having it converted to XHTML...
I've had at least 2 experiences with that particular tech, and I found it horribly over-engineered and a total PITA to work with.
On top of that, I still can't figure out exactly what problem its trying to solve, unless it purpose is job security to overpaid corporate contractors.
We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just leave everything else be.
It's because XSL is (recursive) functional programming, and most developers fight that fact trying to write imperative XSL.
> We have HTML5 and CSS for rendering and JSON for content, and we should just leave everything else be.
Except you're not going to anything with JSON without writing Javascript code, since neither HTML or CSS do understand JSON. XSL works without a single line of Javasript and it is still supported by most browsers.
It does use large parts of Firefox code, and is already having issues in the post XUL world of Firefox.
"On Dec 14, 2018, we're saying goodbye to the events RSS feed. We think some of your team members may have used this feed.
We're focused on building better tools for viewing and monitoring activity, for admins and users alike. Here are some other ways you can see what's happening in Dropbox"
I don't see any relation, but could any factor have influenced the timing of these announcements? Or is it just a coincidence that two large co's drop RSS within hours of each other.
Because, why would something simple as RSS be a burden to maintain? The code has been written (!), the format well understood, the years gone should have ironed out the bugs, so what could be the problem?
The only difficult thing to maintain may be an XML parser, but that is also there since the Netscape days and, for RSS, you don't need current XML technologies (XPath 2+), you are fine with XPath1.
But it costs some $$$ but it's a great service and worth it IMO.
FWIW, I only want to see RSS feeds in a browser from any device I have and not have to own the RSS backend myself, so my method works for me.
Looks like a random personal blog site, I looked around first but currently still have no idea what this site is otherwise for.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migratio...
I submitted it to HN right away, but it didn't get traction.
Hmph. Well, this is why I support Fire—...Oh, shit.
chrome://flags/
Also, there is Chromium:
I was asking for evidence that the main things people complain about can be changed with flags.
And your answer is "Flags exist."?
I asked for evidence for the claim that list X matches list Y. You linked to list Y, which is both trivial to find and useless by itself.
Until you specify what those features are, all one can do is show you where to change flags. Now you've resorted to using letters to tell me. Do not compute.
> People have been bitching about Chrome too, and those things they were bitching about can also be disabled using flags.
That is what I asked for evidence of, the things most people are complaining about being fixable with flags. I didn't ask for evidence of my own issues.
On the plus side a bit of testing just now has made me aware that "site per process" and "process per site" do nearly opposite things, and the one that saves memory does actually still function. (The flag is the one I don't want, though, heh.)
Are you asking for a list of everything people complain about with chrome?
Yes yes I would also love to see a browser made by someone who cares about your privacy, but thus far this is what we have.