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Comment by dguo | 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...

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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)

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!

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