What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean:
1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI
2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text
3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one.
This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a default feature. And thus support the official mission of Mozilla.
Would mozilla block it if a RSS advocate group would provide the development work to get this back into the browser? Is there a technical issue, like that there is no fitting RSS/XML parser that can be used?
I don't know what Mozilla is up to. I always was a big promoter of Firefox, but in many recent updates I see more UI bling and deteriorating functionality or buginess. On Linux I'm waiting for an update so Firefox doesn't freeze my entire OS when opening a new tab, and on Android recently the address bar and back-button started to malfunction, and for a long time the tab navigation is really bad. I hope they add RSS functionality, but most of all I hope they fix things so Firefox can continue to be the browser I love and recommend to others.
Firefox dropping RSS is one of their many stupid decisions (it's not like RSS changes a lot and takes a lot of maintenance)... I'm seriously thinking about switching to Otter (installed it today)
After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird
Firefox and chrome had them for a decade, it did nothing.
Beating a dead horse will not magicaly revive it. RSS is not dying because people have forgotten about. It always was an obscure feature for a low number of special people, and this did not change. And today it's even worse, because world has moved on, yet the RSS-crowd has barely adapted to it.
I'm using Newsfeeds for 15+ years now, and with every year I'm moving ,pre and more away from them, because that's not were modern live is anymore. We should start adapting and raise a new school of tooling for the purpose that RSS feeds, instead of playing around with yet another bunch of low effort-solutions in hope to find the magic potion.
If you wanna bring in new blood, you should deliver them tools where they are, to raise them up in their own world. But today tooling in RSS-space is so aweful bad and outside of peoples daily live...
I love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader.
RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.
Apple Podcasts is an example of client which doesn’t look like a tool from 15 years ago.
This is quite what RSS needs: Killer usecases for the Z generation. And podcasts are only halfway fashionable. Instagram, OnlyFans… it seems RSS needs a payment model to be fashionable ;)
I remember when Google Reader shutdown and I was outraged. Found RSSOwl and migrated all subscriptions tediously. Then YouTube shut down its RSS feeds and all I had left was basically slightly smarter bookmarks to a scattering of blogs. Then Firefox removed RSS. At that point, why bother trying anymore?
Entirely replaced by link-voting sites now, like HN.
If you're interested in furthering RSS (and Atom, JSON Feed) - one way to help this along is to continue extending it to bring it modern. For instance, I've documented an extension for adding temporary 'status' to the feed - useful for pinned posts or broadcasting that a livestream is beginning.
It feels like there is still a lot of room to extend these formats - part of the advantage to them is how easily they can be extended. The media enclosure extension is the reason they've been so useful for podcast subscriptions.
> Now you know how to escape the attention-draining, empathy-killing, critical-thought-suffocating siren song of the algorithms.
The only way I got my sanity back to cut out everything that's not RSS. I still use HN's algo, but everything else goes to NewsBlur. I'm trying to quit the HN algo, but can't do it yet... mainly because the content is actually interesting.
When I first started using a feed reader, I looked for patterns in articles I liked from posts on sites like HN. after a while I had enough to keep me busy.
I don’t think it’s an either or thing so much as a matter of intervals. Come back from time to time to top up with new sources you missed before.
I recently added an RSS feed to my personal blog, hosted on github pages, and I was astonished at just how easy it is. I wish all of my friends just had blogs and RSS feeds instead of Facebook or Instagram accounts.
You may like micro.blog. It’s a blog/rss based social network. You can create a blog with them or import an existing RSS feed (what I do). It’s all chronological. And since it’s “just rss”, you can use different apps to use it like Instagram or Twitter.
I've been writing a decentralized messageboard[0] with some friends lately; the global index and tags have atom feeds, and each thread has an atom feed. There's also an atom feed of recent comments. I've written some simple tools to fake a desktop client for the messageboard and have some of the atom feeds linked to various IRC/matrix rooms. Pretty handy. I wish that all messageboards had RSS feeds for thread lists (or better yet, each thread also has its own) because having to jump from site to site to site is a pain, I'd rather just get notifications in a simple way.
The tech is great, the feeds are just garbage / 2nd tier citizens. Garbage in, garbage out rule still lives.
e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one.
Might as well not use RSS...
Love the concept but have concluded in practice it is a non-starter. The usefulness of it depends entirely on what providers stick in the feed. And all their focus is on pushing their app/twitter/insta etc. Not hard to monetize RSS.
I really love the model Ars Technica went with! As a free user you’ll get the first couple (3 maybe?) paragraphs of each article and for paid subscribers they’re offering full text feeds
RSS is great. But it’s just a delivery mechanism. A great reading experience for me is a chronological news feed, and a list of each source’s latest post. I don’t check my newsfeed daily so a list of each source’s latest post and when they last updated is critical for me to not miss out.
I use https://sumi.news which has both of these views, and can follow RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. Another reader with the per-feed view is https://fraidyc.at, but it’s a browser extension with no newsfeed view.
I'm glad I'm not the only one doing this. RSS can make a comeback, but it's going to take a little education. I use a "you probably already use this" framing by connecting it to podcasts.
> I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff
newsblur has a 'trainer' feature where you can train it to hide certain topics or authors and highlight others. it doesn't work with every feed though so you'll have to try it out yourself or maybe there are other readers that do something similar
RSS has a lot of benefits for accessibility that we don't talk about enough. I often wish RSS was still a thing so I can diff pages when they update. The content is what matters not the chrome.
I am sure that RSS is the way to go, to fight clutter and stay on top of the information noise out there. I love Reeder https://www.reederapp.com - a really good looking and well designed RSS reader. (unfortunately only for the apple eco system).
And each time I see an article like this, I realize how much I miss google reader. So much so that last year I decided that I'd rebuild it myself but it's definitely not something one person can pull off on his own.
It's not great nor complete, but is very simple and does the basic thing, it has no ads and there is no risk somebody will turn it off or push it in commercial ways.
I built it about a month ago over the weekend and haven't looked back to other popular services.
If you're a developer, making an RSS reader you like seems like a very nice side project to try out new tools, frameworks, etc... more useful than a TODO list and also very simple to build.
It never ceases to frustrate me that these sorts of articles invariably focus on RSS, and say little to nothing about Atom.
This article mentions Atom once:
> (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.)
Here’s what I say about it:
If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took over and froze the ecosystem at a certain point in time that was just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS.
If you’re doing any other type of feed, use Atom, because it’s technically substantially superior to RSS and supported just as well.
Where Atom and RSS are both supported, you should always prefer Atom, because RSS has the potential to mess things up because it leaves the client to guess whether certain fields are text or HTML. RSS is simply a hopelessly incorrect format, whereas Atom models content types properly. RSS is even harder to write correctly than Atom, due to things like using a weird date format.
Has anyone found a way to build RSS from Facebook pages?, seems FB made it more difficult for instances as RSS Bridge to build RSS and the only solutions i have found are premium services which need monthly payments.
For those still looking for a standalone RSS reader that can work offline, or if like me your web consumption was fully filtered by FeedReader for years, I can recommend QuiteRSS.
Google Chrome killed RSS. When it came, all other browsers had native RSS support. Everyone switched over to Chrome but to this day Chrome cannot read RSS natively.
Well, I think the opposite is correct. The only solution is to archive everything. therefore I do, I accomplish this with a Miniflux instance with about 360,000 items in it. Then again I kept all my blog content going back until 2009, for 10 years,. That is until 2019, when I decided to start completely over.
[+] [-] onli|4 years ago|reply
1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI
2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text
3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one.
This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a default feature. And thus support the official mission of Mozilla.
Would mozilla block it if a RSS advocate group would provide the development work to get this back into the browser? Is there a technical issue, like that there is no fitting RSS/XML parser that can be used?
[+] [-] Metricon|4 years ago|reply
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/
Source: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief
Also, for those not aware, Youtube still supports RSS feeds (for those without Google accounts) in the format of:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={Channel Id}
[+] [-] rapnie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SimeVidas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Black101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 12ian34|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|4 years ago|reply
Firefox and chrome had them for a decade, it did nothing. Beating a dead horse will not magicaly revive it. RSS is not dying because people have forgotten about. It always was an obscure feature for a low number of special people, and this did not change. And today it's even worse, because world has moved on, yet the RSS-crowd has barely adapted to it.
I'm using Newsfeeds for 15+ years now, and with every year I'm moving ,pre and more away from them, because that's not were modern live is anymore. We should start adapting and raise a new school of tooling for the purpose that RSS feeds, instead of playing around with yet another bunch of low effort-solutions in hope to find the magic potion.
If you wanna bring in new blood, you should deliver them tools where they are, to raise them up in their own world. But today tooling in RSS-space is so aweful bad and outside of peoples daily live...
[+] [-] uallo|4 years ago|reply
Website owners could easily do that by themselves; it would be a trivial change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT
[+] [-] mynameismon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yaina|4 years ago|reply
RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.
[+] [-] laurent92|4 years ago|reply
This is quite what RSS needs: Killer usecases for the Z generation. And podcasts are only halfway fashionable. Instagram, OnlyFans… it seems RSS needs a payment model to be fashionable ;)
[+] [-] hypertele-Xii|4 years ago|reply
Entirely replaced by link-voting sites now, like HN.
[+] [-] smolyeet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maturz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] robobro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickscondor|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten...
It feels like there is still a lot of room to extend these formats - part of the advantage to them is how easily they can be extended. The media enclosure extension is the reason they've been so useful for podcast subscriptions.
[+] [-] zozbot234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clircle|4 years ago|reply
> Now you know how to escape the attention-draining, empathy-killing, critical-thought-suffocating siren song of the algorithms.
The only way I got my sanity back to cut out everything that's not RSS. I still use HN's algo, but everything else goes to NewsBlur. I'm trying to quit the HN algo, but can't do it yet... mainly because the content is actually interesting.
[+] [-] andrewsardone|4 years ago|reply
As an FYI in case you’re not funneling HN through your reader, this is pretty handy:
* Hacker News RSS https://hnrss.github.io/
You can subscribe to the front page, the firehouse, comments, search queries, and more. I really like it!
[+] [-] hinkley|4 years ago|reply
I don’t think it’s an either or thing so much as a matter of intervals. Come back from time to time to top up with new sources you missed before.
[+] [-] vanilla_nut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesvandyne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jorengarenar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robobro|4 years ago|reply
Is JSONfeed actually used by anyone on HN?
[0] - https://0chan.vip
[+] [-] manuelmoreale|4 years ago|reply
So yes, someone on HN is using it.
[+] [-] realsimplesynd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|4 years ago|reply
e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one.
Might as well not use RSS...
Love the concept but have concluded in practice it is a non-starter. The usefulness of it depends entirely on what providers stick in the feed. And all their focus is on pushing their app/twitter/insta etc. Not hard to monetize RSS.
[+] [-] axiolite|4 years ago|reply
Run it through an RSS full article extractor:
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#full-article-extra...
Many feeds are useless without one, but tremendously useful with one.
And if you don't like a website's RSS feed, make one yourself, formatted as you see fit:
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml
[+] [-] sys_64738|4 years ago|reply
https://www.economist.com/feeds/print-sections/69/leaders.xm...
[+] [-] hutattedonmyarm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tofukid|4 years ago|reply
I use https://sumi.news which has both of these views, and can follow RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. Another reader with the per-feed view is https://fraidyc.at, but it’s a browser extension with no newsfeed view.
[+] [-] hopesthoughts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|4 years ago|reply
https://viewfinderfox.com/follow-by-rss/
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mackrevinack|4 years ago|reply
newsblur has a 'trainer' feature where you can train it to hide certain topics or authors and highlight others. it doesn't work with every feed though so you'll have to try it out yourself or maybe there are other readers that do something similar
[+] [-] afinlayson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanamo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axegon_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msurdi|4 years ago|reply
It's not great nor complete, but is very simple and does the basic thing, it has no ads and there is no risk somebody will turn it off or push it in commercial ways.
I built it about a month ago over the weekend and haven't looked back to other popular services.
If you're a developer, making an RSS reader you like seems like a very nice side project to try out new tools, frameworks, etc... more useful than a TODO list and also very simple to build.
[+] [-] dntbrsnbl|4 years ago|reply
Mine is here: https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive
[+] [-] allenleee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismorgan|4 years ago|reply
This article mentions Atom once:
> (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.)
Here’s what I say about it:
If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took over and froze the ecosystem at a certain point in time that was just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS.
If you’re doing any other type of feed, use Atom, because it’s technically substantially superior to RSS and supported just as well.
Where Atom and RSS are both supported, you should always prefer Atom, because RSS has the potential to mess things up because it leaves the client to guess whether certain fields are text or HTML. RSS is simply a hopelessly incorrect format, whereas Atom models content types properly. RSS is even harder to write correctly than Atom, due to things like using a weird date format.
(Look through older comments of mine for more explanation and reasons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....)
Can we please stop talking about RSS and talk about feeds? A bit like we finally mostly stopped talking about SSL in favour of TLS.
[+] [-] stiltzkin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nokya|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smusamashah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hopesthoughts|4 years ago|reply