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.

Comments

Why do I use Firefox Again?

[nucrash]

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?

Re: Why do I use Firefox Again?

[quintus_horatius]

You're not alone. I use Live Bookmarks daily.

Like others are saying, I hope it remains available through a plug in because it will be sorely missed. If not, it's departure won't be enough to make me switch to another browser as my daily driver, but it will impact my experience negatively.

Re:Why do I use Firefox Again?

[slack_justyb]

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?

Re:Why do I use Firefox Again?

[jellomizer]

In many ways RSS isn't needed as much. Back in the dial up days and broadband that is less then 1mbs RSS was almost nessary as we could get the info we wanted without waiting for pictures to load up, crazy ads, Javascript that was not well coded, and the crazy plugin feature. RSS were clean way to get data.

However today, we have data aggregation sites, and bandwidth is often not a big deal, even a heavy website, is fast to load.

That being said, I don't get the reason behind removing it, unless its maintenance is that much harder to manage then it is worth. But how many bugs does that feature get that needs to be fixed.

I can see Google getting rid of it, because of Ad revenue. But for Mozilla?

Re: Why do I use Firefox Again?

[yurikhan]

So run Tiny Tiny RSS on your own server. Or Go Read. Or any other self-hosted RSS daemon. (Yes, these do use accounts and cookies.)

If you rely on Firefox to poll your feeds, you risk missing posts if you are away from your computer for a while, or seeing dupes if you use more than one.

Re:Why do I use Firefox Again?

[drinkypoo]

Surely extensions will crop up to replace the missing functionality, which is where it actually belongs — like everything which is not core browser functionality. If you run Pale Moon, you can use these extensions (two of three of 'em, anyway) to read feeds.

Re: Why do I use Firefox Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already options for RSS reader add-ons, I use FeedBro myself. So you may or may not get something exactly like Live Bookmarks, but you certainly will have ways to access RSS feeds without leaving the browser or using a web based reader.

Re: Why do I use Firefox Again?

[Darinbob]

I don't know a lot about RSS. What I do know is that I get a list of recent BBC and Slashdot stores that I can click on. I use this daily.

I have never seen an RSS reader that worked in a similar fashion. If they get rid of this feature i don't think a plugin would being it back. I don't want pictues, I don't want curated news, I don't want summaries, I don't want a browser page full of stories, I don't want anything that looks remotely like a phone's social media news app. I just want the headlines in a list and have it work like any other bookmark.

Re: Why do I use Firefox Again?

[Darinbob]

Risk missing posts? Is that a problem somehow? I admit I don't understand RSS much. But with Firefox it's just a list of headlines and I can click on a headline and get the story. I don't care if I miss a headline or that I can't see yesterday's headlines, I'm just browsing the news and this is the best way I've ever found to do this on the web. If people use RSS differently then I don't care, I just want the feature that Firefox has today.

Re: Why do I use Firefox Again?

[blogagog]

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!

Re:well, sure

[cascadingstylesheet]

Also, if you are allowed to use feeds, you might get updates on things in mere chronological order or something crazy like that.

Mozilla Can't Win

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

For fuck's sake

[xack]

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?

Um, why are they doing this?

[mad zambian]

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.

Re:Um, why are they doing this?

[scrimmer]

It is way easier (much faster) to skim through the RSS feeds for headlines, rather than going to the website itself.

This captures it perfectly.

I've 63 subscribed feeds, about 55 of which I review daily. Skimming for relevant headlines and then opening those pages in new tabs has become a central part of how I, and others I've introduced the feature to over the years, find and read articles on the web. I've curated a wide range of sources through LiveBookmarks and RSS, and this Firefox feature has been the most efficient way for me to find items of interest. I might also add that I'm using, by today's bleeding-edge standards, antiquated hardware, as I'm sure not an insignificant number of users do, and the RSS feature helps to facilitate web browsing.

(And, I saw the headline for this story through my RSS feed for Slashdot.)

Seems reasonable to me

[urusan]

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.

Nice move

[Tsolias]

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... ?

Re:Nice move

[amorsen]

And they're massively better off for it.

Modern Firefox is an absolutely great browser.

Re:Move to ESR

[93 Escort Wagon]

Why are you dragging Eric S. Raymond into this?

Re:Who cares ?

[dryeo]

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.