Bring Back RSS Feeds to Browsers

This is a good time to remember the short span when Firefox actually would show an RSS Symbol in the address bar after it found a feed on the page, allowing you to click on it to view it and subscribe. I thought, the future of RSS was bright back then. They removed it shortly after.

That they removed even the formatted feed view a few years back was just an insult!

But they could also never manage to cash in on microformats. So much potential there.

As a vivaldi user, this reads a bit strangely to me; do other browsers not support RSS anymore? Surely at least firefox does, right?

The problem of RSS feeds on browsers is keeping track of what you already have read in other devices. It can be done, anyway, if you use the same browser everywhere (i.e. Firefox on mobile, tablets, whatever) and it supports that feature. But it still is something to add to the conditions list.

I made two web extensions to do exactly that:

https://blogcat.org

And “feeds and blogroll discovery” on Firefox Marketplace.

None of them require accounts. They run fully on your Firefox. No backend server either.

This is the type of user-benefiting feature that Firefox should focus on instead of rewriting every backend component (layout engine, JavaScript interpreter, etc.)

I mean...even if browsers start to support it again, why would a publisher be encouraged to promote an RSS feed? No ads, no tracking....