Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Removes Core Product Support For RSS/Atom Feeds (gijsk.com)
Starting with Firefox 64, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product. Mozilla's Gijs Kruitbosch writes: After considering the maintenance, performance and security costs of the feed preview and subscription features in Firefox, we've concluded that it is no longer sustainable to keep feed support in the core of the product. While we still believe in RSS and support the goals of open, interoperable formats on the Web, we strongly believe that the best way to meet the needs of RSS and its users is via WebExtensions.
With that in mind, we have decided to remove the built-in feed preview feature, subscription UI, and the "live bookmarks" support from the core of Firefox, now that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons.
By virtue of being baked into the core of Firefox, these features have long had outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage. Making sure these features are as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would take a surprising amount of engineering work, and unfortunately the usage of these features does not justify such an investment: feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.
With that in mind, we have decided to remove the built-in feed preview feature, subscription UI, and the "live bookmarks" support from the core of Firefox, now that improved replacements for those features are available via add-ons.
By virtue of being baked into the core of Firefox, these features have long had outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage. Making sure these features are as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would take a surprising amount of engineering work, and unfortunately the usage of these features does not justify such an investment: feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.
And cue the comments from the other 99.99% of users: I've never used RSS in my life.
#DeleteFacebook
So I get pocket top sites, autocompletes in my address bar to shit like hilton.com, plus other sponsored nonsense. Yet RSS feeds are too difficult to maintain?
Anything ancillary to web browsing should be add-ons, including Pocket, whatever that is.
That's what went through my head when I saw Firefox 64.
but honestly, this is something they should think of on the front of the curve, before implementing a feature.
": I've never used RSS in my life."
You should try it, seriously.
Go here:
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMain
Click Bookmark in Firefox.
Select 'Live bookmarks" and decide where you're going to put it on the bookmarks menu.
Now you have a popup menu that lists the stories on Slashdot. You no longer have to visit Slashdot to see it.
It's simple, fast, clean, and pretty much the main way I read new website.
The code is already written and working in Firefox, so Gijs Kruitbosch is talking totally out of his but. None of the NEW CODE will be tested anywhere near as deeply as this EXISTING feature. He's making changes to remove it too. I honestly don't know what the real reason is, but he is talking shit when he's trying to remove a major feature like that.
I assume there is a fork I can switch to?
Honest question from one of the 0.01%: How do you people parse news across the web?
I go to a handful of sites which provide most of the information I'm looking for. Some are general news sites, others are more topical or special interest. I also follow a fair number of webcomics.
Does everybody only read aggregators?
No but they are a source I use. RSS I really find constraining to be honest and for the more specific interests of mine I find it essentially useless.
Do you visit all of your sources websites individually? How is that not driving people insane? I just don't understand.
It's a handful of sites so it's genuinely not a big deal. Plus RSS isn't really making things easier for me and I find the RSS readers to be more than a little clumsy for my workflow. It doesn't organize it better or provide me more information or even reduce the number of things I click on. Plus it isn't supported by some key sources I follow. If it works for you then you be you but I don't really see much of a value proposition in it for me personally.
N/T
And chances are you've never used a braille terminal in your whole life. Doesn't mean someone else doesn't desperately need it.
Nobody "desperately needs" RSS feeds in core Firefox. There are plenty of RSS readers available for those who need one and it will still be available via extensions which is probably where it always should have been.
OK, now imagine instead of a 'Slashdot' bookmark, you have a menu item, and when you go to the Slashdot bookmark, the submenu pops up and lists the new articles available on Slash.
You don't even need to visit the website and it exactly fits in with your workflow of going to a bookmark menu.
Slashdots bookmark menu is here:
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMain
It's CORE functionality of Bookmarks, bookmarking an RSS feed. Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they next remove bookmarks and you have to use Pockets to store bookmarks.
But hey, they say bookingmarking an RSS feed is too difficult to maintain existing code, so I'll just switch to a fork that CAN handle book marking RSS feeds, because it seems that Firefox is beyond Mozilla to maintain these days.
Well either that or they're just trying to copy Chrome, yet again.
Getting back to being a WEB BROWSER, rather than a shitty swiss-army-knife of pointless non-browser-related "features".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The pessimist in me thinks that if anything is to be learned of past history of Firefox development, the next step after removing a feature from core and into extensions is to deprecate / remove the API(s) this extension relies on to function. Or at least the APIs that enable it to work in a comfortable manner vs. UI experience.
Personally I use RSS feeds of 7 different blogs (wow, blogs still exist?) in order to easily follow when new posts are made. It's not much, but at least I don't have to manually check them out, quick browse through live bookmark menu is enough.
Remember when Firefox used to display an icon in the Location bar when you were on a site with an RSS/Atom feed?
With that UI element gone, it's no surprise almost nobody's using the feature. I'd be curious what % usage was before the UI change.
Unsurprisingly, Chrome also doesn't support RSS feeds except through add-ons.
Google to Mozilla: Remove RSS. "Right away!"
I have feeds on my FF toolbar that show me the latest articles and I click them if one interests me. I can do it with just a single click and a wave of the mouse rather than firing up some external program. Unless they've fixed up the webextensions RSS feeds so you can have a separate button per feed (and no, having separate extensions per feed is NOT sufficient) that also generate a menu showing each item, it's not a good enough replacement, IMHO.
Boo.
Just say no.
At least Emacs was a nice OS, even though its editor sucked.
HTML5 is not even a nice OS.
Web browsers should not exist *at all*! They already compound the unrelated functionalities of a hypertext viewer and network file synchronizer, apart from being a shitty platform inside of a VM inside of a real platform, that Xzibit would be proud of! The textbook example of the intter-platform anti-pattern. (I recently ran Firefox or Arch in a VM implemented INSIDE Firefox. Apart from being slower and shittier, it had zero advantages over the real ting. ... No, VMs do not add security. The additional [pointless] layers [of utter idiocy] only expand the attack surface.)
Why not just make a hypertext viewer that works like a PDF or TeX or ROFF or RTF or whatever viewer, and have it use whatever file access facilities the OS offers? I’m sure with FUSE, you could whip up a httpfs client in an evening! And ssl should also be its own independent layer, and not mixed in with the normal protocols! ...give every window an (optional) path/URL bar, and there you have your "browser". Without any of that "thou shalt not have any other gods beside me" cancer, that is so typical of "frameworks" and commercial/Windows-style applications.
Make your OS document-centric instead of application-centric, with a window being a document
There is no reason to use failfox at all anymore.
I just add my RSS feeds in Outlook. Super easy.
I don't respond to AC's.
It is an awesome way for me to scan the day's news and a diverse group of websites very frequently, especially while at work. I can't stress that enough. I scan slashdot every hour or so through Live Bookmarks and people walking by my cube can't tell that I am not working until I find a page I want to read.
I've noticed a lot of sites dropping RSS support and that severely impacts the amount of times I visit them...not out of protest, but just finding better articles elsewhere or forgetting the other sites exist.
I see it as a win/win. They keep me engaged and visiting more and reading articles (as well as viewing ads) I might not have otherwise and all they have to do is serve some tiny XML. The alternative is that I only visit your site when I remember it exists and I want to.
That's probably why few people were using it.
Statistics abused; again. HOW did they gather usage stats?
I click RSS live bookmarks more than ANYTHING in the GUI. If you include keyboard shortcuts the RSS feeds are #3 or #4... behind tabs, url bar, going backwards. But if you measure time spent, it's going to look like nothing.
They fail to inform users of a feature; if not HIDE it then say nobody is using it.
#1 RULE AT MOZILLA NEEDS TO BE: Do not remove anything that can't be exactly replaced with an add-on. Then they need to create a whole category for add-ons that restore old features. I just spent considerable time trying to find good replacements and maybe some are better but I just want what I had without digging over tons of search results.
Tab controls still suck since Tab Groups died; still can't get a tab sidebar replacing the top bar... The add-on bar died... WTF? Why can't we choose how many tool bars and where they are located again? Do they WANT to be as crippled as Chrome?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Perhaps they looked at people who clicked "Live Bookmarks" and found it was almost never in their usage stats.
Which is true of me (who uses live bookmarks a zillion times a day, but these are bookmarks I added to my bookmarks list ONCE, YEARS AGO, I *use* the live bookmarks, I don't add new "Live Bookmark" because new reliable news sites don't pop up often!).
Perhaps that's why they think a core feature like RSS Live Bookmarks isn't used.
It sounds insane, to remove core functionality supported by all major news sites, including Slashdot (see top right on the page, those G+, Facebook icons, and the RSS icon IS THE FIRST ICON). Seriously, WTF is going on in Mozilla, Pockets? Pesting to login?? I get they want to make money, but nobody attacks their users and wins market share.
1) Many power users who know about RSS have turned OFF telemetry data gathering by mozilla. They don't know what their power users are using. We are the users who bring in others and make decisions what gets put on to organization computer networks. I'm turning it on so they don't take away more features - if I wanted Chrome's lack of options I'd already have switched.
2) how do they measure it? by clicks? I hardly click anything in the gui already. The menu bar I have on. I never pick anything but use it as a REFERENCE for keyboard shortcuts. I bet they wouldn't see that as being used... BTW, WTF is it with removing "view source" from the view menu? It's not like that menu was full.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
RSS feeds are also supported in Thunderbird, which is where is makes sense to deliver them: right alongside other streams of communication. I'll be pissed if they "come for RSS" in Thunderbird.
Message to Flash-in-the-pan Developers: Just because it seems cool, or everyone else is doing it, doesn't mean it adds value.
I still remember when Firefox was a 5mb download.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Browsers are too complex as it is; I've never used RSS, and neither have 99% of the other users.
One man's garbage is another man's vital lifeblood. You have no idea what's vital, and not, to others.
Go ahead and show me a single credible example of someone who actually needs RSS built into core Firefox. Not wants or prefers but actually needs to the point that there is no practical alternative. Dazzle me.
The entire point of having a tight core functionality and using add-ons for features not universally needed is precisely because people's specific needs differ. It's just another version of the unix philosophy of having small tight code that does one thing well and communicates with others. If you prefer having RSS because it works better for your work flow but 99%+ of other people don't give a shit then it is idiotic to include it in the core package since it isn't required.
One problem with extensions is that they are quite literally a no-man's-land, in terms of security.
Completely separate issue. And frankly having a feature that almost no one cares about is a security problem too because it increases the attack surface and needlessly adds to the complexity of the code base.
RSS/Atom? FTP? Nah, fuck you.
Pocket? Hello? DRM? Hell ya boi!!!
Now remove pocket.
And all the dumb shit on the home page.
Life strives for maximum efficiency. If they brain is not needed, it is rationalized away.
The problem is, that often times, it goes too far, and starts being harmful again. That’s where efficiency becomes laziness.
That's why I oppose that "KISS"/"simplicity"/minimalism cult so much. (Not the band.) Because here, the concept itself got the "simplicity" treatment, and went from efficient to harmfully lazy.
I don't want bloat either. But it takes a real pussy to sacrifice power and freedom for "simplicity", just because one can't handle so much power and freedom. Maybe it's the mindset of these times, but I learned to deal with it, and get the maximum potential out of everything. Because the fruits that one reaps are much more enjoyable than laying there like an iBlob, whining about how "complicated" it is, that one still gets to choose if one "has to" swallow that lowest common denominator that one is being spoonfed and told to like.
Amazon pulls the RSS feed from my blog into my author page; so, it's useful for many things besides its primary application. Still, RSS is an excellent way for people to be reminded about my blog. Interesting, I'm not an RSS user, only an RSS creator.
Money money money money,
M..O..N..E..Y.!
Pocket sucks donkey dongs. Absolutely no one will deny this, except the monetary recipients at Mozilla.
No one with a reasonable degree of knowledge about browsers will even use it.
They have to financially support :)
I've been saying it for 15 years now, Mozilla needs the donation teat cut off, and either an organizational fork enacted, or to be so starved of money that the dregs of the organization will finally peel off to leech elsewhere.
https://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/709/539/6ed.gif
...I like LIVE BOOKMARKS. They're insecure? How? Seriously? What's the exploit here?
Oh well, time to switch to something different. I found this:
Feedbro.
Pale Moon started off as a Firefox fork, so they inherited a lot from FF. See release notes http://www.palemoon.org/releas... for v28.1.0 (2018-09-20)
* Removed Telemetry accumulation calls, automatic timers and stopwatches. This removes a very noticeable performance sink for all operations on all platforms.
"Turning off telemetry" merely means not sending the accumulated data to Mozilla. The data collection and crunching is still going on if you "turn off telemetry" in Firefox.
Pale Moon has physically ripped out the code. This means...
* faster browsing, because no cpu cycles are being used for data accumulation
* less code for the developers to maintain
* less attack surface
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user