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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of funny how we've come full circle. First there was RSS. People didn't like having an RSS program, so a reader was bundled with the browser. Then social media took over from personal blogs & feeds. With declining use, browsers removed RSS readers. Then federated social media grew. Now browsers are re-bundling clients in the browser.

Everything old is new again...

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RSS is still around! Most news & blog sites support it, though sometimes you have to go digging in the HTML to find the feed URL. On the client side, I find Feedly to be satisfactory on both desktop & mobile, and they actually have a business model so hopefully they'll stick around. There are of course many other clients, but that's the one that stuck for me.

Setting up an RSS reader was the best thing that happened to my browsing habits in years. Can't recommend it enough.

Constant refreshing of half a dozen sites was replaced by occassionally looking into one program. Literally all the sites I read had an RSS feed, even if they didn't advertise it (maybe they don't even realise it). And a while ago I added an RSS feed for replies to my comments here[1], which I thought I might implement myself, but of course somebody already did (thanks!).

In addition, it helps keeping up with blogs I do read, but I don't read immediately, e.g. ACOUP.

It also solved the problem of Firefox Android's atrocious tab handling ([2], basically because I took Firefox out of the equation).

1 https://hnrss.org

2 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20090

Hell I opened this very thread from an RSS reader site I host myself. There are dozens of us.

And, in fact, Mastodon supports RSS

Frankly this just seems like Vivaldi hopping on a not so compelling trend.

I don’t even think your list of events is a successive, connected one. Browsers once had RSS readers so now it’s full circle that Vivaldi adds to its kitchen sink for a social network barely anybody uses?

Vivaldi also has an RSS client. So does Opera.

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