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Comment by PavlovsCat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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