Hacker News Reader

Firefox used to have built-in RSS support, but it was removed in Firefox 64: https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...

Wow I never knew. I would have used it if I knew.

The "rss support" was a folder, filled with links named after the article titles.

It was good that it was removed, as it was useless to put it mildly

Though useless, I think that some RSS extensions were able to pull feeds from there.

It was an easy and simple way to get into RSS. I used to use it quite a bit. Just the effort of finding an RSS reader is enough to turn people off the service. Compare to Twitter, which exists on all platforms. I don't think we can underestimate the interface problem for RSS.

I actually used it considerably for my news site bookmarks on my bookmarks bar. It was great for just catching up on the day’s headline. It’s a feature I sorely miss.

The Livemarks extension duplicates the feature pretty acceptably.

> The "rss support" was a folder, filled with links named after the article titles.

You're describing the "live bookmarks" feature, which was only one part of the RSS functionality that was removed from Firefox. I never used live bookmarks, but I used the feed discovery and subscription functionality all the time -- only some of which can now be restored with addons.

They also removed the ability to preview RSS feeds, which is annoying because one of the few certain ways to subscribe to a feed was to preview it and then hit subscribe in whatever addon you were using.

In the past it was even possible to subscribe with whatever addon you prefered from the firefox RSS preview directly, but that was already lost after the jump to WebExtensions.

There are addons that restore RSS previews and improve on firefox' old feature.

You are describing the majority of rss readers. Newsboat could be said to be a folder, with a file inside called urls. Sure it's actually more than that, but that's the part you interact with.

So what's your point?

There is an add-on called Awesome RSS [1] that brings back the web feed icon to the address bar. It doesn't implement the "live bookmarks" feature though, but you can use some external reader such as Newsboat [2] which will also let you read the content of the articles.

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

[2] - https://newsboat.org/

I was looking at this the other day[0] I actually think Brief[1] might even be better than the RSS support that was in Firefox. I haven't tried it yet but I intend to.

I use Thunderbird as well, and that has RSS support but to me that seems counter to my workflow. Typically I'll be on some site and want to subscribe, and then view in my browser. Doesn't really make sense to be in an email client.

On my phone I use Flym[2]

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...

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

[2] https://github.com/FredJul/Flym

I tried out Brief. It looks nice but there are a couple of problems:

1) There also doesn't seem to be a way to sort them by date or alphabetical order or domain.[0][1]

2) It seems like it should be possible to 'group' feeds, but I couldn't figure out how.

3) When Firefox updates certain things break

I think as a result of this I will try out newsboat. I found this tutorial[2] that seems to explain it nicely.

[0]: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief/issues/208

[1]: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief/issues/383

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUFCRqs822w

Awesome RSS is a great extension, and is compatible again with Firefox 64+ and now adds direct subscription feature to Feedly, Inoreader, NextCloud Reader and even Tiny Tiny RSS (or universal feed display. https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/

Another great new extension is Want My RSS because it's compatible with 10 RSS readers for direct subscribtion (you can add your own when you have a self-hosted reader for example). Feed detection and feed display is also great! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

Using debian stable, so I still have 60.6.1esr... not looking forward to this.

Yeah, I didn't know this because I run a customized nightly I forked, so I'll be keen on keeping all the files relating to this feature when I eventually merge with the upstream nightly so I can still have my cake and eat it too.

Why did Mozilla not propose a new version of RSS then ?

Perhaps it would harm the business model of their proprietary software, Pocket.

I discuss it with one dev contributor of Mozilla and they say that they didn't want to loose time maintaining Live Bookmarks. And the Live Bookmarks was underused. RSS is no more a prioritary subject. The problem is that they don't only suppress Live Bookmarks, they suppress all the ability to manage (I mean detect and display) RSS feeds... and that's terrible!

The decisions that Mozilla comes to when it comes to Firefox sometime puzzles me... but overall, Firefox is still my #1. It was probably more work to remove RSS then to keep it... but either way, it used to be my favorite way to find a page's RSS link (but I disabled Firefox' telemetry and similar reporting tools, so i blame myself a bit too)

I'm considering integrating RSS with Polar:

https://getpolarized.io/

Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.

I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.

We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.

Yes, please do. It would be a great addition to an already great project.

Another +1 on this.

Polar looks great! Just the kind of service I’m looking for. (Hope an iPad/tablet version is in the offing alongside mobile.)

Looks nice but why does it need 3rd party cookies to work?

Also, copy-pasting is broken:

Bigtableis a distributedstoragesystemformanagingstructureddatathatisdesignedtoscaletoa verylargesize:petabytesofdataacrossthousandsofcommodityservers.

Also, expected keyboard shortcuts (eg hitting delete to delete a document) don't work.

I am starting to get annoyed seeing you promoting it in every thread of a vaguely relatable topic. Could you please tone it down a bit? :)

Please stop using HN to spam your own site.

I think polar needs a heuristic evaluation, it takes too many clicks to do certain things. Also, I couldn't figure out how to export a card to anki. Exciting project though, I check back every few months.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to block users on HN due to spam?

> I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox.

Fortunately, Thunderbird still has this feature.

I wrote about reading blogs with Thunderbird not long ago:

http://andregarzia.com/2018/11/reading-blogs-with-thunderbir...

I think a similar setup would be good for many people here who wish to read RSS but doesn't want to add another SaaS to their life.

I’ve used that for over a decade, but eventually gave up and signed up for NewsBlur so reading on my phone and my laptop would be in sync. It is open source and you can run it yourself but I gave up and let Sam host it for me.

The other in-sync option would be setting up an rss/imap gateway, which is not even available as a SaaS afaik, so would cost about as much in hosting (unless you already have a server you can use) and about 20 times in labor.

Happy paying NewsBlur customer - even though the iOS app is a battery hog.

Huh? In Firefox you'd visit a webpage and if RSS feeds were available you'd be able to subscribe to them, IIRC.

Where in Thunderbird do you find feeds to subscribe to?

I always found the feed url in a web browser, copied it, and then added it manually to Thunderbird. Granted, it's not the exact same thing as how Firefox used to do it, but it works well enough once you have all the feeds you want set up.

It does, but! I really want Thunderbird to be good, but the web feed experience is infuriating. If you don't care about open source or you just care plenty about UX, you wouldn't use it for feed reading. (I got started on a list, but it's more like the whole concept needs to be rewritten.)

Outlook supports RSS

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-are-rss-feeds-...

> As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.

You're right! For users this is absolutely true.

Yet, almost all the companies that you might think of as potentially interested in RSS are platforms. You cannot sell ads in a protocol.

This is the core of why Twitter has replaced RSS. RSS is better for users, but Twitter is better for publishers and platforms. So users wind up following content.

Sorry to split hairs here but RSS is not a protocol but a syndication format: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Atom is also a format but have proposed a publication protocol : https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023

You're completely correct!

Is it perhaps possible that in this particular case, the difference you so wisely point to between a format and a protocol is possessed of a great and bountiful opportunity to be relevant? The discussion at hand is between "protocols" and "platforms", which might otherwise be cast as "standards" and "products".

Again, you're completely correct. It might just be worth considering that in some cases, a distinction without difference can be of limited value to a discussion where it is at best tangential.

I was not disappointed to see RSS removed from Firefox, because I want my already too-complex browser to have as limited a set of functions as possible. The more first-class features they remove, the more secure and usable their product will be.

If cars didn't have air conditioners... they'd be more reliable overall!!!!!

I wouldn't disagree.

The problem, of course, is that for some people, the removal of those features makes the browser no longer meet their needs. Worse, which features are "critical" varies from person to person.

The flexible answer, of course, would be to have a relatively basic core browser and an extension system powerful enough to allow the features to be implemented that way. Like Firefox used to be. Unfortunately, Mozilla decided to neuter the extensions instead.

The first part of your post puts the priority on having more software that can read a reliable formula, which I think is the opposite way to go, since the forumla is already there can't all browsers do this? Yes, but they have refused up until now, why? Because their focuses is web pages ... Make some hybrid RSS web feed with a universal interface and you have Twitter. Approach it from the software side and you have federated, inconsistent implementations of a reliable formula.

Would like to see more effort in this area too. There was some work done a few years back at https://www.subtome.com/ to make subscribing to RSS feeds easier.

Totally agree! Subtome was a great project but it lack updates. I talked weeks ago with @julien51, it's creator, and he told me that it didn't have time maintaining it but he would integer contributions.

The silver lining is that no built in support is better than poor builtin support as it opens the doors to interesting add-ons filling that need.

That said, I would love if Firefox had an excellent RSS experience, but frankly it was always a confusing afterthought.

Can anyone comment on why Mozilla is integrating dodgy services like Pocket and now some ill-conceived screenshot web locker? Is it just hunger for data as revenue?

"Cloud" features have been recently removed from the screenshot tool, FYI.

Not really related, but does anyone know of an open source Pocket alternative?

Try Wallabag: https://wallabag.org

It used to be called Poche (French word for pocket) but they had to change it becuase of a legal threat from Pocket.

Well they bought Pocket, so I'd assume they wouldn't want their investment to be for nothing.

They bought Pocket AFTER they installed it by default in Firefox as some kind of PR disaster control.

Conspiracy Theory: Mozilla wanted to acquire the service from the beginning, but before doing so they would integrate it beforehand to stir up some drama, devalue it a little bit and buy it for less.

Re-introduce, not introduce. Firefox not only used to do a fine job of displaying RSS feeds, it also simply displayed an RSS icon in the URL bar (if the page had the respective link elements HTML header) from which you could subscribe to all the provided feeds. There certainly was room for improvement, but still, they had it, and they canned it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.

I've been wondering if the recent addition of AMP to Gmail as precursor to Gmail having RSS integration. I know I'm delusional but it feels good to think there might be a push back to RSS reading in a Google product.

I wish there was pushback against the notion of "hoping" and "wishing" for companies to do the right thing. Companies should be more afraid of the ire of informed customers informing other customers, than of competition, that's the delusion I live in... they should worry about having done too little, too late, instead of us always keeping an ever slimmer hope for ever smaller breadcrumbs alive.

Gmail had rss integration through Reader back in the day. With the short lived Buzz, had easy integration for discussions on rss feeds.

I use the Awesome RSS addon [1] to get the icon in the URL bar back. Also RSSPreview [2] to see whether the feed actually contains what I want to subscribe to. The previous integration where you could add the feed to Thunderbird directly from Firefox with a single click was much better, though.

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

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

Thank you for the two add-on links. I would add Feed Preview [1] to the list.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

Thank you for sharing this! I had not encountered an RSS addon with 'subscribe' functionality before. This addon basically restores everything I wish had not been removed from Firefox.

(It's a shame I couldn't have found this on my own. addons.mozilla.org is unbelievably bad for discovering useful addons. It takes a thread like this to turn you on to the good stuff.)

For those (like me) who actually liked the old system of a folder with "bookmarks" in it there is Livemarks [0].

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/livemarks/

Firefox had a way to display RSS/Atom feeds earlier which they removed, but it did not allow subscribing to them in any meaningful way other than live bookmarks.

I thought Firefox used to have a one click way to subscribe in your preferred reader back in the Google Reader days.

Yes that was possible and I always used it to subscribe to TTRSS. One day after an update I saw that they removed the button (which used https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/r...) with which you could subscribe in Firefox that your custom TTRSS url should be added to the list off the ways to subscribe and I wrote a plugin to read it https://github.com/jeena/tt-rss-plugins/blob/master/jp_fxsub...

That worked for a short time until Firefox removed that API. Now I need to install this addon to be able to do it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/

It's basically impossible for people to find out how to subscribe to a RSS feed nowadays.

Why not Google?

Google failed to gain traction in the social network space with G+. If you can't beat them commoditize them!

Why not make interoperable networks based on open standards first class citizens in chrome/chromium? Not just by adding support but also by helping move the RSS standard forward.

They had their chance. And we're still mourning the loss of Reader to this day.

Google used to own the most used RSS feed subscription service. They shut it down. So, not Google.

Good idea! Maybe one day Google will create an ecosystem around RSS. They could call it something like “Google Reader”...

TheOldReader is a really nice RSS reader built after the demise of Google Reader. They've been consistently solid.

https://theoldreader.com

I second the recommendation for TheOldReader. It's where I eventually ended up after Google Reader's demise.

There's plenty of really good solutions around : 1. Online: Inoreader, Feedly, Newsblur Newsbin, The Old Reader, Feeder... 2. Browser extension: the great Feedbro 3. Desktop: Liferea (Linux), QuiteRSS (Windows), Caffeinated, Readki, Reeder (MacOS) For RSSOwl and RSS Bandit (Windows), there's nothing new for years/ The great FeedDemon (Windows) stopped it's dev years ago. 3. Self-hosted: Tiny Tiny RSS, Fever, Leed, Selfoss

RSS is anti-ads. If people don't leave their reader, they don't visit websites, don't load ads, don't ping tracking services. So any alternative to RSS, content creators relying on ads will fight tooth and nail to not make it mainstream ever.

That said, Google did produce a version of AdSense specifically for RSS feeds (although it was discontinued in 2012).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#Feeds

Mails are also ad-free, and they have no problem showing them in gmail. Same would be possible for newsfeeds. Actually, it would be even simpler, as they know the urls and could link this directly with ads shown in web search or on the specific pages. Though, majority of people using RSS are technical competent people, using adblockers, so likely it would be just pointless.

Yes but with mails, you read... mails. That is what you consume. With readers, you consume content that is most probably there because of potential ad revenue. Yes, RSS is generally used by technical people - but you'd be surprised how many technical people don't use adblocks, sometimes because they don't care and sometimes because they don't think it is ethical to do so. And there always is the possibility that it can evolve into something that is more convenient used by masses. So it is a net negative in terms of revenue.

And I'm not only talking about people that produce readers, but also about content creators. I'm making a site and hoping to turn a profit through ads and my interesting content - why would I want to provide a convenient stripped down version of my website for you to consume - something that is a net negative for my revenue (hosting and transferring data costs money)? Sure, I can provide "excerpts" in RSS, but I'd rather prefer you go to my homepage to see what is new - it is thoroughly AB tested to lure you in, spend some time and see some ads - maybe click one.