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.
The Management of my feeds has been a primary reason that I have used Firefox over other browsers since.....
I am deeply disappointed in the loss of this feature. I am not ready to shift to Chrome and I don't want to shift to Chrome. Yet moves like this are deeply frustrating.
Is this a feature that others don't use? Am I unique? What's going on?
Place something witty here
Feeds are too user-centric. You might not have all your reading choices aggregated and tracked by a central authority!
Maybe you should not be expecting that kind of support from a web browser.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
When Mozilla adds new features to Firefox because that's what keeps people upgrading and using the product, they are blamed for adding bloat and slowing the product down. When Mozilla removes little used features, suddenly they are doing away with a vital function and the one reason a person had for continuing to use Firefox.
The death of Firefox with version 57 was bad enough, now the corpse is decomposing as well. I don't think Waterfox amd Palemoon will be able to keep up with the surge in users they're getting from Firefox refugees. Can we take any sort of action to force Mozilla to stop removing features?
Since ESR releases are supported for a year, with ESR60 you will keep this feature for a year.
By that time, some sorto of alternative solution (in the form of an extension or plug-in) will be available.
That is what many of us did with the blocking of plug-ins and XUL that acompanied the shift to Firefox quantum...
Best of luck
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
The RSS reader is something I use regularly, and have something like 30 feeds subscribed to including the one here on Slashdot. It is way easier (much faster) to skim through the RSS feeds for headlines, rather than going to the website itself. But pageviews etc, is what count these days I guess. Screw the user's time and any data caps.
Mozilla gets a downvote for this one.
Trying to associate Microsoft with "fun" is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy. -Tycho
I use Firefox and I didn't realize this was a feature. The engineers seem to have thought it through, and it makes sense to remove this kind of largely unused legacy code, since it costs time and money to test and maintain. I mean, the last updates were 7 years ago. They're also giving a migration path for the users and there are reasonable alternatives, so it's not like they're just leaving people out in the cold.
Most importantly, it's really a feature that makes more sense as an extension than as a built-in part of the browser. As an add-on it can evolve separately from the browser, and multiple extensions can compete with each other (and fill in different niches) without having to go through the trouble of developing a full web-browser.
They've been shitting on firefox's code since the version 27.0.
They destroyed the add-ons community,
they destroyed the interface,
they have zero mobile presence,
they lost a shitload of market-share,
they started taking political positions,
and what did they learn about this?
remove moar features.
do you remember https://www.reddit.com/r/firef... ?
The feed reader functionality in Thunderbird doesn't show signs of going away (I hope...). If you want a place to easily drop your feeds into, Thunderbird's been working fine for me since I left Liferea. No need to integrate email functionality whatsoever, just set it as your default feed reader only if you use another email client or webmail.
Don't Mozilla-bash too hard when another of their offerings is still doing what people want. :P (hint, Mozilla, hint)
SeaMonkey is dying. Not enough developers to keep up with the rapidly changing code from Mozilla. Hopefully they can make the adjustments to keep up but it doesn't look good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I have been using Netvibes to aggregate all my RSS feeds onto a single page since the demise of iGoogle. As it's all browser-based, it's easy to get to it, whatever device you're on. It works better than a dedicated RSS feed application for me at least.
I have tried several RSS addons for Firefox. Feedbro works well. It is how I read all my news across many web sites.
I only go to slashdot from a RSS bookmark and other sites. I suppose it will save me time but in the end I'll just hate mozilla's idiotic management more. The limited resource excuse is always a fallback for BS arguments; it's not honest many times it is used - this is an existing feature which made it past many big transitions; they don't need to rewrite it in rust.
Many of these IDIOTIC moves are not technical like the multi-process transition. Management must be all narcissistic novice users. Power users decide for others and promote software for others. I literally bring 100s of users to Firefox every year - upsetting people like me is foolish.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Can anyone explain the meaning of this sentence? I literally can't figure out what he's trying to say there.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they had anybody with a brain in management at Mozilla, they'd NOT remove anything without making an API for somebody to add back an equal or greater replacement! They should give TIME for some to surface and then have a whole category on the Add-on site for restoring old firefox features. It is just basic customer service; when you upset the customers provide them SOMETHING they can do about it. Hell, Mozilla promotes "freedom" yet they keep imposing their BS onto others. They could poll users and at least cite that when the changes happen; it's likely the poll will agree with them anyhow but at least it is better customer relations. Not this power trip by a tiny minority organization trying to push people around like their the big dog.
Why aren't more people upset the SAME mozilla post mentions that Firefox RSS was ported to Chrome and somebody may port that back into firefox for them??
I forgot that I have an add-on which RESTORES the RSS icon which I had to add when they removed the subscribe to RSS icon feature! No wonder few people even KNOW about RSS!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Seriously, I would like a month to go by without Firefox removing some feature I use daily. I'm already stuck on FF 56 indefinitely due to continuing lack of multi-row tabs on later versions. Live bookmarks are the way I keep up with news... pull down the feed, see at a glance anything I might want to read, like this story for example. I use it to keep up with Craigslist ads too, based off search queries. I've never found anything nearly as convenient.
Why would I want to use a separate program to see browser links?
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
I tried desktop RSS feed readers many years ago, back in the Firefox 3.0 era, when the RSS update happened in the main UI thread and would draw your browser down to an absolute crawl. Nothing I found worked the way I actually use RSS feeds.
I mainly use Live Bookmarks for webcomics. I have around a hundred I follow. Every day, I roll down a big folder on my bookmarks bar that has a Live Bookmark "folder" for each of them, and read any unread entries, one at a time. This does take a while but most of that time is spent reading, not on the RSS process because I can just hover over an LB and see if I need to read anything. I've manually sorted them into groups by how often they're supposed to update - daily/5-a-week/3-a-week/weekly/etc. which speeds the process up even more. And the few webcomics that don't have a working RSS feed fit into the process nicely - they happen to have mostly-consistent schedules so I just remember "hey, it's wednesday, ___ should have updated". It's also not uncommon for a webcomic to go on a lengthy hiatus. I have a subfolder of "maybe dead?" LBs which I check less often.
I really do not want to miss even one update (most of the ones I read are story-based), which RSS readers designed for skimming a news feed generally don't focus on. In particular, ones that just shovel everything into one ginormous stream won't work for me. Live Bookmarks follows my browser history so it shows which entries I have and have not read, so even if I skip a few days I won't be unable to catch back up.
As extreme cases, it also needs to be able to deal with an RSS feed with several hundred entries in it (one comic includes its entire decade-plus archive into the feed), several feeds that include entries I don't want to read (news/blog entries), and one that goes in reverse order for whatever fucking reason (newest item at bottom).
I read from multiple devices, so Firefox syncing history between them mostly keeps that in line (this is maybe 50/50 whether it actually works or not, because Firefox doesn't sync redirect pages and like half the RSS feeds I read don't give canonical URLs).
Do you (or anyone else) have any desktop RSS feed reader that works for my use case as well as, or better than, Firefox Live Bookmarks?
My sympathies. I never used the firefox tool, but I understand the frustration with disappearing readers.
I recommend https://theoldreader.com/ as a replacement.
But no one has really done this. For the only thing I use this Firefox feature for, the URL is *always* to a web page, never to a PDF file or something else. Thus it acts exactly like a dynamic list of bookmarks. If they get rid of this feature, I'll probably stop visiting Slashdot permanently.
(never mind that Firefox already is my normal PDF viewer, given that modern Acrobat Reader is a crime against humanity)
Why mail? I use it in Firefox for seeing BBC and Slashdot headlines. Why should that be in mail?
The Mozilla team is already set in its decision and has even drafted a blog post for the official announcement. In this unpublished document, engineers share more of the reasons that led to the decision to remove Firefox's built-in feed support and Live Bookmarks utility.
â-- Live Bookmarks doesn't really have a concept of a "read" state. It uses a history visit state as a proxy, which doesn't work for redirects.
â-- Live Bookmarks doesn't work well with Firefox Sync
â-- Live Bookmarks is not available for Android or iOS and has no mobile integration
â-- Doesn't work well with podcast types of feeds
â-- Only 0.1% of the Firefox userbase uses Live Bookmarks
â-- Outdated and hard to maintain code (last update was 7 years ago)
â-- Uses its own custom code for various tasks instead of reusing Firefox's current libraries
"These features had an outsized maintenance and security impact relative to their usage," the draft announcement said. "Making these features as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would have cost significant time and effort, and the usage of these features doesn't justify such an investment.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Feedbro is nonfree software; according to its license entry in Firefox Add-Ons (where the site you pointed to directs users to get the Feedbro add-on) the license is "All Rights Reserved".
Feedbro tries to convince you they care about your privacy by including "We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow." on their site but that's completely unverifiable. If they really believed privacy was important, users included, they'd distribute the software as free software -- free for the user to run, inspect, share, and modify.
You should not use Feedbro to do this job. You'd be better off keeping your privacy and using software that respects your software freedom.
Digital Citizen
Leave it in Thunderbird and nobody gets hurt...
With all due respect, I have almost the opposite view : I use RSS aggregators everywhere (on my website, computers, phone) with a single aim : eliminating advertisement and fancy website interfaces, leading to a simple, clean, homogeneous presentation along *all* my information channels (and I have over 100).
Without aggregators I'd be terribly less efficient.
Now, that FF removes this doesn't bother me at all -I love aggregated info but not all-in-one things, and I switched to dedicated apps almost when RSS appeared. There are so many of them...
Herve S.
I assume any sufficiently nerd household has multiple computing devices
I wouldn't be so sure that most users of Live Bookmarks live in a sufficiently nerd household. In a lot of cases, "multiple computing devices" are likely to be devices that go to sleep when not in use, such as smartphones and laptops. Or does "nerd" mean owner of a Raspberry Pi single-board computer or a router specifically purchased for DD-WRT compatibility?
and an ISP that only gives you one public IP address so you have to run a boundary router/NAT box. So I run TT-RSS in an LXC container on that router.
Provided you can even choose to install a container on a router. I imagine that most households lease a modem-router combination device from a home ISP, and I don't see how these are user-flashable. Even those who own their own modem and router probably bought consumer-grade gear, which isn't marked on the box for compatibility with DD-WRT or other user-installed software, at a chain similar to Office Depot or Best Buy.
And you don’t need a domain name in order to run a server
If you don't have a domain name, you don't qualify for a TLS certificate from a publicly trusted certificate authority. If you don't have a TLS certificate, you can't run HTTPS and are instead restricted to cleartext HTTP. If you run a cleartext HTTP server on anything but localhost, the browser will wall it off from certain JavaScript features.
but if you want that, free-of-charge dynamic DNS providers are a thing.
Provided the dynamic DNS provider 1. is on the Public Suffix List and 2. supports TXT records. Otherwise, use of Let's Encrypt to obtain a certificate for the server on your LAN is not feasible.
Honestly, and especially if it leaves to its name ("Tiny") you should run this on localhost. I don't see why not at least :)
Should it be expected that a user of Firefox for Android learn how to run a server on localhost on an Android device? If not, then explaining why not will help answer your question.