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Comment by hrayr | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot?

  ...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome.  
  I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as 
  if we're considering this, when we're not.  It just gets people's hopes 
  up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action.

This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.

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The fuss is about Google embracing/extending and then suffocating every WWW technology they can't shove at least 20 ads into.

Had Google actually even "embraced" RSS? I would say no. Reader isn't one of their core products and never was.

It wasn't a core product even when gmail had a prominent link to it at the top of the window? http://guijournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Gmail-more-...

Do you call everything that has an advertisement for it somewhere else a "core product"?

By "somewhere" you mean "at the top of every Gmail page"? Then yes, I'd figure that something Google prominently displays at the top of every Gmail page is probably pretty important to them.

I mean... when something is widely displayed in the middle of a list of things that includes

* Gmail

* Google Docs

* Google Calendar

* Google Photos

* Google Search

and nothing else, then I would naively consider it to be roughly as "core" as the other things on the list. You wouldn't? Why not?

I've never thought about a definition of a "core product" before, but it seems to me that it would be something that the company takes seriously, dedicates a lot of time on, and consciously depends on for user retention and growth. I don't think Reader fit any of those descriptions, and the placement alongside actual core products was an advertisement - a hope that it might become something more, but it never did.

Such as?

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