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Comment by yegle | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the original post explicitly mentioned this use case and offered two ways to workaround.

Gotta love the reference to the <link> header element. There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too.

Man, reaching way back in history here, but this reminds me of why I stopped contributing to Mozilla decades ago. My contribution was the link toolbar, that was supposed to give a UI representation of the canonical link elements like next and prev and whatnot. At the last minute before a major release some jerkhole of a product manager at AOL cut my feature from the release. It's incredible the way such pretty bureaucrats have shaped web browsers over the years.

Good user-facing software tends to have a coherent vision, and that involves getting features cut that people put a lot of time and effort into; even though those features have value, it's possible they don't have value in the product under development.

I don't really have enough context to say whether that was the case here. Mostly I'm raising the comment to note that this is an issue in commercial software too, but the sting is immediately moderated by "At least you got paid." It's a lot easier to see one's work fail to be reflected in the finished product when you can dry your tears with the bills in your money-pile (and I don't know how open source competes in things as cut-throat and taste-opinionated as UI when that continues to be true without solving the problem by injecting money into the process, which carries its own risks).

It's a browser. its job is render HTML

if a fix renders HTML better and more complete it should be done. it is always possible to make it configurable or change it later.

instead mozilla is pushing anti-web llm integrations.

> There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too.

This is actually a feature of Orion[0], and among the reasons why I believe it to be one of the most (power) user-oriented browsers in active development.

It's such a basic thing that there's really no good reason to remove the feature outright (as mainstream browsers have), especially when the cited reason is to "reduce clutter" which has been added back tenfold with garbage like chatbots and shopping assistants.

[0]: https://kagi.com/orion/

iIRC, all of the proposed workarounds involved updating the sites using XSLT, which may not always be particularly easy, or even something publishers will realize they need to do.

Here's a 3rd option :)

For RSS/Atom feeds presented as links in a site (for convenience to users), developers can always offer a simple preview for the feed output using: https://feedreader.xyz/

Just URL-encode the feed like so: https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2...

...and you get a nice preview that's human readable.

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