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Comment by yakubin | Hacker News Reader

The biggest blow to RSS was dealt by browsers dropping support for displaying it in human-readable form, not Twitter/whoever ceasing publishing them.

Thanks to that, now when someone, who doesn't know what that is, stumbles upon a website linking to one and follows such a link, they'll be greeted with gibberish. Previously, they could see buttons exposing the functionality of subscribing to such feeds and find out about this wonderful technology. Now, they'll just get the hell out of that page.

Mozilla, champion of the free internet, right...

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Can someone actually explain to me why Mozilla stopped building in an RSS reader into Firefox?

If it also can subscribe to substacks, it's like a Pocket that actually gets updates. Heck, they can just build it on Pocket!

It seems like that could be incredibly valuable for the open web — and a free tool for conveniently reading newsletters built into Firefox might even increase market share? Looks like they removed it in 2018...but I never heard of people switching to Firefox from Google Reader, so I assume it was never very good, or poorly advertised?

It took me years to find this, but here’s a summary:

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/25/mozilla-plans-to-remove-rs...

In short, updating the feature to competitive UX and security expectations wouldn’t have been worth the effort based on the usage numbers.

It's frustrating how Mozilla will use usage statistics as justification to kill a feature, whilst at the same time using nagging UI prompts to promote underperforming corporate decisions like Pocket and FFSync.

Perhaps they should have a rule that any feature proposed for deletion should be promoted equally aggressively for six months. If usage still doesn't increase then remove it.

True, I think third-party RSS readers are always going to be better though. Integration with specific partners and vendors makes RSS accessible. Mozilla would have developed something great, but it would have been tied to Mozilla products and services..

They should learn from Brave and replace the RSS native ads with their own.

> Integration with specific partners and vendors makes RSS accessible.

wat

Browser sync is a fairly crucial feature for many users who have multiple devices, or even just dual-boot. Or who want a backup of their bookmarks and history.

I don't care about a competitive UX for the in browser support. Just something that vagually renders the XML as something readable with a button to add to reader of choice. Even just leaving the old address bar icon indicating there is a feed available would be nice.

Firefox itself never had a real rss-reader. It had rss-parser which was incorperated into the bookmark-ui, making it barely useful for the purpose if consuming feeds. 3rd-party feedreader coming as addons were more useful than this and they were not really good either. So it's no surprise this feature had low usage and was thus removed.

The human readable form was done by attaching an XSLT to an rss.xml file. That's still 100% do-able, people just stopped doing it.

I believe quite a few browsers don't ship an xslt-capable engine anymore.

If you haven't verified this, you're engaging in uninformed (and potentially harmful) speculation.

No comment about browser rss-feeds can be meaningfully harmful.

It's an uninformed comment about XSLT support being removed from browsers—not "about browser rss-feeds". Misinformation about something as consequential as that definitely has the potential to cause a non-zero amount of harm if people take it at face value.

Works in Chrome. Adding XSLT to your sitemaps/feeds will cause Google to index them in search.

I use that heavily at https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo. The provider of the feed could/should just ship it alongside.

P.S.: I prefer atom/RFC4287 for being well-defined and with e.g. sane dates.

> About link rel='about' missing. link rel='license' missing. § Imprint link rel='terms-of-service' missing. Privacy link rel='terms-of-service' missing. ShaarliGo

Vivaldi has this now.

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