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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean:

1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI

2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text

3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one.

This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a default feature. And thus support the official mission of Mozilla.

Would mozilla block it if a RSS advocate group would provide the development work to get this back into the browser? Is there a technical issue, like that there is no fitting RSS/XML parser that can be used?

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I've been using the "Brief" addon for Firefox since the built in RSS reader was removed and it's worked very well for years:

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

Source: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief

Also, for those not aware, Youtube still supports RSS feeds (for those without Google accounts) in the format of:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={Channel Id}

I don't know what Mozilla is up to. I always was a big promoter of Firefox, but in many recent updates I see more UI bling and deteriorating functionality or buginess. On Linux I'm waiting for an update so Firefox doesn't freeze my entire OS when opening a new tab, and on Android recently the address bar and back-button started to malfunction, and for a long time the tab navigation is really bad. I hope they add RSS functionality, but most of all I hope they fix things so Firefox can continue to be the browser I love and recommend to others.

I use Feed Preview https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

The extension really covers the functionality. That with a slightly nicer design and on by default, that is what is needed.

Firefox dropping RSS is one of their many stupid decisions (it's not like RSS changes a lot and takes a lot of maintenance)... I'm seriously thinking about switching to Otter (installed it today)

Dropping RSS likely didn’t change their declining popularity for better or worse - and that’s the only thing they are worried about right now (and rightly so)

> Dropping RSS likely didn’t change their declining popularity for better or worse

probably not... what did is Google having popups promoting Chrome every time you did a Google search.

Vivaldi also has an RSS reader FWIW

Mozilla doesn't have an incentive to add RSS since they would prefer larger Pocket adoption.

There is nothing stopping them from providing RSS functionality with Pocket. I'd switch in a heartbeat from my current feed reader to Pocket if they did.

I quick skim a lot of my rss feed articles and routinely save the longer ones to pocket.

After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird

This would be more about making RSS visible for browser users than making Firefox a feedreader. There are many great readers. But the one thing where RSS really is worse off now than it was a decade ago is discoverability. That hurts the open web. Making a change in a browser could improve the situation a lot, and the one browser that would fit to that is Firefox.

And it would be a huge marketing win for Mozilla in tech circles.

After more than 20 years with Thunderbird as my reader (first NNTP, then RSS), I switched to NewsBlur and am much happier.

While thunderbird is a good reader, it doesn’t synchroniZe “already seen” across machines, and many feeds only have the latest 10 items in their XML feed, so unless you poll continuously, you are likely to miss updates.

I like to occasionally take a week off the world (without the laptop), and many of my feeds have more than 10 updates a week (some more than 10 a day).

This is, just like the failure to link to a stylesheet in the feed, IMO a failure on the publisher's part. The feed should support pagination with the appropriate rel=next links in the feed. WordPress is interesting in that it supports pagination through a URL parameter (e.g. ?paged=2), but it doesn't actually advertise them...

Indeed, but it is what it is. You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates, or use a continuous server based solution and receive all of them.

I’m a 4-year happy paying customer of NewsBlur, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

> You can either use Thunderbird and miss updates

Not true; maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last comment.

As an example, for platforms like WordPress that support pagination, if you miss some updates that were posted to alice.example.net/feed/, then you can add alice.example.net/feed/?paged=2 (and ?paged=3 and so on) to Thunderbird until it bridges the gap between items you had before going dark and what you have now.

It works for accessing a blog's backlog of content, too; it's possible to discover a blog today with regular (let's say weekly) updates stretching back e.g. 8 months and still get at the old ones. In fact, I've done this to go back and ingest years of posts after first discovering a feed only recently and then realizing that I've been missing out by not having it on my radar since the beginning.

Just to warn you, Thunderbird keeps corrupting my RSS feeds and failing to pull them in. I have since switched to Akregator and this is much better.

> but it would boost RSS adoption

Firefox and chrome had them for a decade, it did nothing. Beating a dead horse will not magicaly revive it. RSS is not dying because people have forgotten about. It always was an obscure feature for a low number of special people, and this did not change. And today it's even worse, because world has moved on, yet the RSS-crowd has barely adapted to it.

I'm using Newsfeeds for 15+ years now, and with every year I'm moving ,pre and more away from them, because that's not were modern live is anymore. We should start adapting and raise a new school of tooling for the purpose that RSS feeds, instead of playing around with yet another bunch of low effort-solutions in hope to find the magic potion.

If you wanna bring in new blood, you should deliver them tools where they are, to raise them up in their own world. But today tooling in RSS-space is so aweful bad and outside of peoples daily live...

> Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text

Website owners could easily do that by themselves; it would be a trivial change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT

Yes, FeedBurner does this[1], and we do it too with Full-Text RSS[2]. The feeds should render as a regular webpage in your browser, but if you view source on those feed URLs, you'll see regular RSS output (XML), but they both contain XSL to transform the XML to HTML in the browser:

FeedBurner:

    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" media="screen" href="/~d/styles/rss2full.xsl"?>

Full-Text RSS:

   <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="css/feed-free.xsl"?>

For anyone attempting this, note that there's an escaping issue on some browsers that requires Javascript to fix[3].

[1] http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnpilger?format=xml

[2] http://ftr.fivefilters.net/makefulltextfeed.php?url=http%3A%...

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168#c80

Funny, the browser I use (Vivaldi) has all these features added only about a month back.

They did that? Excellent :) Thanks for sharing.

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