I just wish Google would have been straight-up about this, had a big blog post saying "Here is why we think RSS needs to be replaced, and we've got some big plans to replace it, which involve a, b, c, and existing standard d. It's a bit abrupt but we're coming out with X on timeline Y."
Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.
This has nothing to do with thinking RSS is dead or needs to be replaced, or whatever. It's just closing a feature request that was never going to be implemented. It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways.
Dude don't play stupid. They don't want people to separate content from form (which would you classify ads as?) which at end of the day means cutting out rss except for twitteressque tidbit links.
That wake up call was when they strangled the Reader social community and started pushing Google+ so heavily on Gmail users: this social network wasn't going to be the kind of service you joined because you wanted to, it would be the sort which is even more hassle to ignore than to use.
Yeah, they did this whole RSS needs replaced thing already and they called it Atom... I think syndication and walled gardens don't mix very well. EDIT: Not that that is what's actually going on here. I don't even know why I'm commenting on this kind of frenzy creating garbage anyway :(
There is no conspiracy here. That feature wasn't going to be brought back to Chrome, and should have been closed a long time ago. Shutting down Reader shined a light on this issue, so if they hadn't closed it before now is a logical time to close it.
Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just inviting people to grind their axes.
I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot?
...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome.
I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as
if we're considering this, when we're not. It just gets people's hopes
up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action.
This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.
RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.
They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.
> RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads
Virtually no content site puts its entire article into the RSS feed. They want to monetize with ads even more than Google wants them to. If RSS was a threat to anything it would be social news services like G+ which depend on a non-federated model to maintain their walled gardens.
I actually read RSS feeds --- using the Currents application (which is supported by Google and under active development; it's getting updates) on my Android Nexus 10 tablet.
So for those people who claim that Google doesn't care at all about RSS, Currents is certainly a counter-example.
And by the way, Google is a big enough company that to claim that a corporation as a whole as an opinion about any subject or any protocol is a little silly. Take for example, "IBM Loves Lotus Notes; therefore IBM must hate SMTP." Absurd. There is a part of IBM that make a lot of money off of Lotus Notes, yes. There are also lots of IBM engineers and former IBM engineers who hated it with a hot blazing passion. I'm aware of one IBM division which supplied its engineers with a Lotus Notes-free e-mail address because it was necessary for them to do their jobs. Specifically, interact with the open source community with a mail product that wouldn't destroy whitespace in patches....
Are you certain that they are specifically trying to eliminate it? It seems as though they are merely abandoning it within their product line and within the company as a whole.
Accusations of an attempt to extinguish the RSS format probably can't be considered until they kill Feedburner, which constitutes a massive portion of the web and all RSS trafic.
On this subject I happened to experience something funny. Maybe one year ago I installed a chrome extension (from the official chrome store) to provide an RSS icon directly in the URL bar in order to subscribe to RSS streams. So far so good, then I don't know when, maybe months later I noticed I had some random popups with ads, it was very strange since I use adblock, I tried to find where these ads were coming from, with no luck. Then a day, I used the chrome inspector to analyze a web page and I observed something strange, on every pages I visited an external javascript was loaded, long story short, turned out the chrome extension was a kind of spyware loading a javascript on every pages I visited and sometimes rising a popup. Maybe it took me more time to find it because I only use chrome mainly for testing, my main browser being Firefox, but this is the kind of experience who removed the little confidence I had on the chrome store, and extensions in general, I'm very careful now on what extensions I install particularly extensions needing to be loaded on every pages I visit.
The past 72 hours: Google Reader shutting down, Chrome's RSS extension removed from everyone's browser and the Chrome store, and "implement RSS natively" issue is now set to "wontfix". Way to be evil, Google.
That's a pretty whiny feature request. I read the first few dozen comments, and I don't really know what exactly was being requested.
It's clear to me that the right approach is an extension specific to your preferred RSS reader. I understand that some browsers have an RSS reader built it, but that still doesn't make it a core feature that's going to be used by a big portion of their users.
This feature request asks for two things to be native in chromium:
1. have an indicator in the browser interface that an rss feed is available for the current page.
2. have a preview of rss feeds rather than unstyled xml. It is just a matter of adding style for some xml files the way shiira[1] first did or the way safari[2], opera[3] or firefox do.
It is clear to me that the second is nice for the user even if the chromium developpers do not intend to implement a full rss reader as it just consists in making some common web documents readable directly in the browser, it is far more logical for a web browser to display rss than to display pdf... The first point is said to distract the user and clutter the interface so I can understand why it should be an extension (firefox voluntarily suppressed this indicator a few years ago).
I'm also going to become less reliant on Google services because when they decide other open standards are less profitable than getting more eyeballs Google+ I don't want to be stuck like I am now.
That's been standard procedure for issues getting a lot of off-topic comments, or have the potential for the same, for some time, and it's definitely welcome when trying to track the status of popular features/bugs. The point of issue comments is to contribute to getting an issue fixed or resolved, not to act as a discussion thread. It's quite clear this was a done deal for some time and there's nothing further to discuss in that issue.
Once a decision is made, further discussion is waste of everyone's energy. If the decision weren't final, the bug would remain open. People can post angree screeds elsewhere, like on their blogs' RSS feeds.
Google next move: Remove Adsense for RSS. By the way Google Currents is doing good job as feed reader and it is relatively new product. I don't think Google has declared war to RSS. Since most of its APIs is based on Atom. May be they want to make a transition to JSON based standard.
"For a better user experience, we have migrated your feeds to a custom Google+ profile. We hope you will enjoy connecting with friends, family, and advertisers while reading news brought to you by Cuke(R)!"
The 1600+ people watching that bug, and the millions using reader are the minority. RSS is for hackers, and Google doesn't want to invest in those people. (Us)
RSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.
I'd say that the movement from print news to digital news and per-author and per-article consumption and the resulting "curation" craze means RSS is more relevant now, not less.
It's just that companies like Facebook and Google are trying to lock in users on their own platforms.
Makes you wonder what is ahead for Blogger. It will probably be assimilated eventually.
That's like saying HTML is for hackers: ordinary users shouldn't need to look at the raw serialization format if the service is any good. The many not hackers I interacted with on the old reader appreciated the way they could keep track of interesting things even if they were only shallowly aware of how it worked.
Exactly. Here on HN we can see people complaining about Chrome being bloated, slow and that they're considering moving back to Firefox as result.
Since only a minority of Chrome users are RSS users, it makes sense to have it as an extension. They're not stopping anyone from building one. So, hack away.
[+] [-] devindotcom|13 years ago|reply
Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.
[+] [-] mdwrigh2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batgaijin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acdha|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannoHung|13 years ago|reply
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
[+] [-] philwelch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andymoe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fakeer|13 years ago|reply
Can't say it's so in this case, but trust me it's the best way to be in some cases :-)
[+] [-] jackmoore|13 years ago|reply
Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just inviting people to grind their axes.
[+] [-] hrayr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rafski|13 years ago|reply
They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.
[+] [-] ChrisClark|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|13 years ago|reply
Virtually no content site puts its entire article into the RSS feed. They want to monetize with ads even more than Google wants them to. If RSS was a threat to anything it would be social news services like G+ which depend on a non-federated model to maintain their walled gardens.
[+] [-] tytso|13 years ago|reply
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and....
So for those people who claim that Google doesn't care at all about RSS, Currents is certainly a counter-example.
And by the way, Google is a big enough company that to claim that a corporation as a whole as an opinion about any subject or any protocol is a little silly. Take for example, "IBM Loves Lotus Notes; therefore IBM must hate SMTP." Absurd. There is a part of IBM that make a lot of money off of Lotus Notes, yes. There are also lots of IBM engineers and former IBM engineers who hated it with a hot blazing passion. I'm aware of one IBM division which supplied its engineers with a Lotus Notes-free e-mail address because it was necessary for them to do their jobs. Specifically, interact with the open source community with a mail product that wouldn't destroy whitespace in patches....
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eurleif|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruswick|13 years ago|reply
Accusations of an attempt to extinguish the RSS format probably can't be considered until they kill Feedburner, which constitutes a massive portion of the web and all RSS trafic.
[+] [-] shortsightedsid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doe88|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrei|13 years ago|reply
I think it's sad. RSS is a lot more open than the alternative: Twitter.
Google seems to think that the result of an end to RSS will be good for them. Unless they are planning on buying twitter, I doubt it will be.
[+] [-] martindale|13 years ago|reply
Also posted as a tweet, because fuck being evil: https://twitter.com/martindale/status/313148391624417280
[+] [-] kevinpet|13 years ago|reply
It's clear to me that the right approach is an extension specific to your preferred RSS reader. I understand that some browsers have an RSS reader built it, but that still doesn't make it a core feature that's going to be used by a big portion of their users.
[+] [-] ernesth|13 years ago|reply
1. have an indicator in the browser interface that an rss feed is available for the current page.
2. have a preview of rss feeds rather than unstyled xml. It is just a matter of adding style for some xml files the way shiira[1] first did or the way safari[2], opera[3] or firefox do.
It is clear to me that the second is nice for the user even if the chromium developpers do not intend to implement a full rss reader as it just consists in making some common web documents readable directly in the browser, it is far more logical for a web browser to display rss than to display pdf... The first point is said to distract the user and clutter the interface so I can understand why it should be an extension (firefox voluntarily suppressed this indicator a few years ago).
[1]: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/reviews/large/shi... [2]: http://media.arstechnica.com/images/tiger/safari-rss-big.jpg [3]: http://www.problogdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/wind...
[+] [-] AaronFriel|13 years ago|reply
I'm also going to become less reliant on Google services because when they decide other open standards are less profitable than getting more eyeballs Google+ I don't want to be stuck like I am now.
[+] [-] martindale|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maxious|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itafroma|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curcumin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
I hope Opera continue to evolve their platform, WebKit engine or not. :/
[+] [-] zanny|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihuman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbayer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlcory|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
It's just that companies like Facebook and Google are trying to lock in users on their own platforms.
Makes you wonder what is ahead for Blogger. It will probably be assimilated eventually.
[+] [-] acdha|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slig|13 years ago|reply
Since only a minority of Chrome users are RSS users, it makes sense to have it as an extension. They're not stopping anyone from building one. So, hack away.
[+] [-] bluebaby|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanspecies|13 years ago|reply