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)
Dropping RSS likely didn’t change their declining popularity for better or worse - and that’s the only thing they are worried about right now (and rightly so)
There is nothing stopping them from providing RSS functionality with Pocket. I'd switch in a heartbeat from my current feed reader to Pocket if they did.
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
This would be more about making RSS visible for browser users than making Firefox a feedreader. There are many great readers. But the one thing where RSS really is worse off now than it was a decade ago is discoverability. That hurts the open web. Making a change in a browser could improve the situation a lot, and the one browser that would fit to that is Firefox.
And it would be a huge marketing win for Mozilla in tech circles.
After more than 20 years with Thunderbird as my reader (first NNTP, then RSS), I switched to NewsBlur and am much happier.
While thunderbird is a good reader, it doesn’t synchroniZe “already seen” across machines, and many feeds only have the latest 10 items in their XML feed, so unless you poll continuously, you are likely to miss updates.
I like to occasionally take a week off the world (without the laptop), and many of my feeds have more than 10 updates a week (some more than 10 a day).
This is, just like the failure to link to a stylesheet in the feed, IMO a failure on the publisher's part. The feed should support pagination with the appropriate rel=next links in the feed. WordPress is interesting in that it supports pagination through a URL parameter (e.g. ?paged=2), but it doesn't actually advertise them...
Not true; maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last comment.
As an example, for platforms like WordPress that support pagination, if you miss some updates that were posted to alice.example.net/feed/, then you can add alice.example.net/feed/?paged=2 (and ?paged=3 and so on) to Thunderbird until it bridges the gap between items you had before going dark and what you have now.
It works for accessing a blog's backlog of content, too; it's possible to discover a blog today with regular (let's say weekly) updates stretching back e.g. 8 months and still get at the old ones. In fact, I've done this to go back and ingest years of posts after first discovering a feed only recently and then realizing that I've been missing out by not having it on my radar since the beginning.
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...
Yes, FeedBurner does this[1], and we do it too with Full-Text RSS[2]. The feeds should render as a regular webpage in your browser, but if you view source on those feed URLs, you'll see regular RSS output (XML), but they both contain XSL to transform the XML to HTML in the browser:
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.
Miniflux does it for me. Although you do have to have a place to install it. I mean, it needs a server. Whether that's a home server that you have, or a VPS, it doesn't matter.
I use Feedly on the backend, Reeder 3 on my Mac and NetNewsWire on my iPad. I did pay for Reeder years ago and I use it on my Mac because it has good keystroke support (j for next article, etc.) whereas NNW does not.
There's a Reeder 5 and the two improvements (for me) that it has over 3 is that Twitter probably won't say "outdated browser" and refuse to show tweets and support for adding newsfeeds directly. I think MacOS added support for this after Reeder 3 was released.
Mixing the two readers is fine because Feedly is keeping track for them. If Feedly were to start charging, I'd probably start using NNW exclusively since they provide the option of using iCloud to sync.
Not sure if web reader is OK for you but I've been using FREE tier of Inoreader for over 10 years now. I love it, it does its job and that's what counts.
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.
Is there any implementation that doesn't require a server-side component? One big appeal of RSS is it's plain old XML that can come from anything over HTTP.
ActivityPub is the part that requires server-side logic. ActivityStreams is a more basic layer that can be entirely static or even serverless, and ActivityPub is built on it.
I don’t enjoy ActivityPub related specs - they give me SOAP vibes - and I’ve struggled with interoperability. (Tried to make my blog act kind of like a Mastodon instance and the learning curve was just way too out there. I’m happy with feeds.)
> 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.
Precisely. For anybody else who'd like to do something similar, I followed the guidance of this post: https://dzhavat.github.io/2020/01/19/adding-an-rss-feed-to-g...
Though it turns out a few of those config parameters were already in my config, so it's even less work than described here.
It is worth noting, for the pedantic among us, that this feed is technically Atom, not RSS. But as some other commenters have posted out in this very post, most clients seem to treat those interchangeably these days and honestly I don't really understand the difference myself.
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.
If you're trying to build one yourself, have a look at the open source Readability code[1]. It was originally developed by Arc90 and is now used by Apple and Mozilla in their browser reader views. The code has been ported to a number of different languages.
I work on a service called Full-Text RSS[2] that used a PHP port of Readability, coupled with site-specific extraction rules[3] to identify and extract article content from each feed item. It then produces a full-text version of the given feed. The idea is you subscribe to the full-text version in whichever feed reader you use and it will give you full-text articles where you had partial content before.
Was more about the wider point than bitching about economist: RSS readers are in a uniquely vulnerable position. There is damn near zero incentive to do this right from providers PoV - if anything the opposite. If you're trying to consume news/info better that seems like a bad starting point to me...even with superior tools.
I've got a self-hosted freshrss install floating around on my home server...so might give it another try at some point. Not massively optimistic given the dynamics though. Everything is about dark patterns these days, not open ad free convenient hard to monetize stuff like 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
It’s basically a “highlight / stop” list for words in title, stories, author names, etc. nice interface for that, but from my experience not very effective.
Iirc Samuel Mentioned they are working on something better that trains statistics/ML on examples. But at present it’s just a “highlight/stop” list.
Shameless Plug: https://UncensoredNews.US
I import the best progressive news feeds, and recommend the best articles (in blue). The other articles are also available if you re interested. The RSS links, link to the original articles, not to my site.
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.
I’ve been a happy Newsblur customer since the Reader shutdown. Every now and again, I look into setting up TinyTinyRSS and similar hosted software but always go back to Newsblur.
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.
I think arguing RSS versus Atom is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic: It's a stupid waste of discussion points, because they are so interchangeable. Let's focus on the general concept of getting feed readers back in to vogue, then push our preferred format.
It’s not terribly common in general, but in content about HTML, if you put things like HTML tag names in titles, it will get mangled by some (most?) feed readers if the feed is RSS. I’ve seen such titles that are broken because the publishers didn’t use Atom more than a few times, and written a couple of titles myself that show up fine because I produce Atom rather than RSS. (I also put things like <em> and <code> in my titles for italics and monospacing, though most feed readers will strip that out and reduce HTML titles to plain text. The almost universal convention that titles are plain text with no formatting is silly.)
RSS is worse than Atom in real, practical ways. Unless there’s a concrete reason for you to use RSS (which largely means “it’s a podcast”), you should use Atom, because it will protect your content against being mangled when you have things like less than signs and ampersands in it.
Returning back to the matter of the naming: I think there are two sound reasons to stop calling it “RSS” and start calling it “feeds”:
① Using one specific, inferior technology to describe it is factually wrong, and perpetuates the wrongness and inferiority, because people hear of RSS and so implement RSS, rather than Atom.
② When someone isn’t familiar with the stuff, “RSS” is just a meaningless name (or could remind you of other organisations that use the acronym, e.g. in India it means commonly-extremist Hindu nationalism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh), but “feeds” invokes a concept that is more likely to be familiar and immediately understood.
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.
Talking RSS and meaning "that feed stuff, you know" is extremely harmful because it adds to the confusion and makes the closed monopolists shine for their "simplicity".
So please talk about Atom and let RSS rest in peace. Atom is technically superior if only because of the reliable standard.
There is on issue, RSS is advert and cookie free. Meaning it creates a clean web, but as such prevents monetization, so I guess it was not suitable technology.
But on the other hand there are many blogs that do not care about Google Ads or similar, so it would be interesting to revamp RSS again.
I follow a few monetized feeds. They’re usually one of:
- One post per week, showcasing the sponsor
- Embedding a static image into every feed entry for their current sponsor
- Adding a text-based „this post is sponsored by“ sentence/paragraph to every post
>Some feeds only give you the excerpt of a post, with a link to see the full post at their site. Don't follow those: they break you out of the RSS reading experience, and trick you into losing time on their site.
What is the incentive for websites setting it up? Isnt that the reason why mpst websites removed it givibg away content for free, with no ads? I never used it myself so im pretty clueless but isnt this why people dont use it anymore ?
Those of us in the FOSS community now need to also move away from GitHub. They are taking our code and putting it into their ML-based copilot product to allow proprietary developers to use FOSS code without having to conform to a FOSS license. This practice makes GitHub is hostile to the FOSS community. Decentralization is key to preserving our software rights.
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?