Slashdot Mirror


Mozilla to Remove Support for Built-In Feed Reader From Firefox (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mozilla engineers are preparing to remove one of the Firefox browser's oldest features -- its built-in support for RSS and Atom feeds, and inherently, the "Live Bookmarks" feature. All Firefox users are probably well accustomed to this feature, albeit not many have ever used it. This feature powers the browser's ability to detect when users are accessing an RSS/Atom feed and then show a special page that lets them subscribe to the feed with a custom feed reader or the browser's built-in "Live Bookmarks" feature. [...] In a recent discussion on the company's bug tracker, Mozilla engineers said they plan to remove feed support sometime later this year, with the release of Firefox 63 or Firefox 64 --scheduled for October and December, respectively.

2 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why do I use Firefox Again? by slack_justyb · · Score: 5, Informative

    The RSS feature is not very good in Firefox. You should really switch over to a desktop RSS feed reader. The parser in the Firefox RSS feed reader is hacked together and on a lot of feeds will silently error and give you garble or no feed entry at all. Usually happens with feeds that mix media in with the XML, such as podcasts, but even an RSS feed that uses images can sometimes make the parser go haywire.

    I get you, and it's really disappointing that they never went back to update the RSS feature to be better. But yeah, the code is old (like seven years old) and no one really wants to fix all the problems it had. It was a pretty neat feature in Firefox, but once I switched over to a desktop based (Liferea) the difference in how the content was rendered was pretty obvious. Additionally, it supported Podcasts as well so that was a nice plus. So it's a shame that the Feed feature never got the polish it should have, but yeah you at least owe it to yourself to try a desktop client and compare it to Firefox RSS. I don't know what feeds you use and if they're pretty Plane Jane, you might never know the difference, but the Firefox RSS just never got the love it should have. Maybe someone will rewrite it into a plugin or something? Maybe make it the client it should of been?

  2. Re: Why do I use Firefox Again? by blogagog · · Score: 3, Informative

    Install the addon 'Brief'. It has it's own RSS detector built in. It will take a little getting used to, but once you do, you'll like it a lot. It's certainly better than going to Chrome!