Just a heads up, it's great to have an RSS feed, but readers won't automatically detect that you have one. I see you already have a link to your RSS feed so if you put this

  <a rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/rss.xml">RSS</a>

That then tells all RSS readers that the link is a feed, and the reader will then detect this. Then say if I use Feedly and want to subscribe to your site, I can link to your homepage and it will automatically detect your feed.

You can also use a meta tag instead if you'd prefer not to display a link. More information can be found over MDN[0] and I also created a blog post on the 5 most important things all blogs should do.[1]

[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/RSS/Getting...

[1]https://michaelbrooks.co.uk/5-important-things-i-learnt-when...

D'oh. I thought I had already done this. Thanks for letting me know.

> In my perfect world browsers have RSS support built in and aggregators like Facebook would allow RSS feeds to be published in timelines.

We had this too...Firefox Live Bookmarks, yanked away because their metrics said no one used them...forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry :/

I use them to this day in Waterfox, tried the Livemarks addon but its not the same.

Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. Pick any of the hundreds. Like this great one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/

Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.

Why - they work fine, they dont change, they dont add a burden to the existing product?

Taking something that works out of your product doesnt ever make people happy, and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work.

Its a "well that's ok that we wont take this on anymore and let those users manage their own problem" use case.

> they dont add a burden to the existing product?

I assume you work in tech, maybe even as a developer. So you know full well that every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden.

> and its never "the perfect use case" to remove features that work.

It absolutely is, if it makes those features better and gives them a focused place to develop outside of the core browser.

If you're so upset about it literally go and press one big blue "Add to firefox" button and have all the previous features, and more, back in under 10 seconds.

Yet Pocket is a core part of Firefox instead of an extension.

And many times have I thought that Pocket should also be in an extension and wondered why Mozilla is taking on the first party responsibility for it - maybe they get some partnership money?

Mozilla owns Pocket.

And yet the server-side part is still closed-source.

Mozilla's manifesto is just marketing now — it's obvious they don't really believe it any more.

That's because Mozilla literally owns Pocket, and sure, it's also perfect for an extension. So you can see why they might be willing to take on that maintenance burden for an uptick in usage.

And I'm not sure how that invalidates anything I said above, or really is of any relevance at all.

The relevance is that you said

> Nobody did use them though. They belong in an extension, it's the perfect use case. [...] every single unused line of code, let alone an entire feature, adds a maintenance, security, documentation and testing burden.

And the same holds true for Pocket.

It's not the same thing. At all.

Pocket is used by people and is a feature Mozilla want to prominently integrate with Firefox. This is due to the financial gains they directly get when someone signs up for Pocket premium.

It's not an unused, dusty feature that's adding a burden to the platform and is a net time + money sink. It's something that makes them money.

As I said, in the comment you just replied to, even if nobody did use pocket then this would be a burden they are willing to take. So, comparing RSS feeds to pocket on the fact that it can be implemented as an extension alone is a nonsensical point.

Pocket directly competes against the open web (in the form of RSS/Atom). If Mozilla was a values-based organisation they would be promoting the open web at least as much as they promote their own proprietary system.

If Mozilla offered a browser that people could pay for without having default settings to maximize revenue, the open web could be maintained.

The relevance is that at browser scale, it's the browser that drives adoption, not the other way around. Removing RSS support from the browser makes people use it less. Mozilla understands this, otherwise they wouldn't promote Pocket to browser core.

I’m personally not upset just worried about the fact that security is now a huge risk because you’re having to trust an extension creator that has access to your entire browser history or worse and who is one auto-update from turning to spy or malware.

You also have a discovery problem having to wade through multiple options increasing your surface area to malware exposure.

IIRC this isn’t even theoretical it’s happened with ones that replaced user style sheets, another “unused” feature that was gradually deprecated.

Maybe the best way forward is to take an apple iPhone approach and have official extensions, similar to the apps that come with the iPhone like the podcast one.

Then when these features are removed they are instead moved to an official extension. Thereby mitigating the security risk and alleviating the discovery problems.

The community can take over these extensions and you have a starting point to personally adapt and fork them that is a lot simpler and faster than trying to maintain a browser fork.

Further the browser maker can more directly see usage of these feature replacing extensions

And finally, when removing features ensure the extensions api has the power to support their replacement.

> they dont add a burden to the existing product?

Of course scope creep adds a burden. It's one more thing Mozilla developers have to tend to.

> Also why would you use Waterfox. It's like Firefox ESR, with a few changed settings and much slower security updates.

Waterfox preserves Live Bookmarks, doesn't do telemetry, was unaffected by expired certificate killing all addons (my FF mobile was affected so I basically had no mobile browser for a few days), among other reasons.

I know after a while I will be forced back to Chromified Firefox when development of Waterfox comes to an end, but at least for now, I can stretch out the moment of a non-Googly browser + Live Bookmarks a few more months or years like whats-her-name in Doctor Strange.

Want My RSS is also a pretty good Firefox extension to detect, display and subscribe to RSS feeds https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

That’s one of the reasons I have Telemetry turned on. Just to show what I am using, so there’s less reasons to remove something.

Do you think that's what telemetry is actually used for?

...yes?

But did technie users employ live bookmarks? I love RSS, but I prefer to use readers that keep track of what I've read, mix more than one feed into the same chronological list, and have better presentation than a freaking drop-down menu.

I've used them continuously since 2005. The dropdown menu is just fine to answer the question 'has Twin Dragons webcomic added another post yet'? or 'whats new in the liliputing.com world'? without any context swaps to -> open a new program on desktop or phone and scroll through a (granted, owned by you, not FB) newsfeed for an hour.

Why would I want to turn off the telemetry?

> Mastodon, or whatever, is fine but RSS is the backbone of blogging.

Just for the record, each mastodon-user has its own RSS-feed: https://INSTANCE/@USER.rss

The main difference between web push notifications and RSS is that as the name implies, notifications are pushed to you on the publisher's schedule, whereas you pull down RSS on your own schedule.

Push has several advantages - one is background power consumption (less work for the device to just sit around and wait, vs constantly firing up the network and polling a server). Another is that you get your notifications in real-time.

However, I think push is way overused. Think about all the notifications you receive (way too many, probably). How many of these did you really need to see immediately? An impending food delivery or Uber arrival, sure (but we could also just use phone calls and SMS for these geoimmediate use cases). Online chats, maybe some of them. CNN publishing "breaking news" that's probably wrong anyway because the event is 5 minutes old? Loan offer #257 from the PayPal app? No thanks.

I'd much rather have the latter class of "notifications" batched up and pulled down once every hour or three, with no sound, vibration or visual interruption.

RSS is actually a great solution for that and I think the mobile operating systems should have built it in from day one, with "harass me via beeping and shaking and pushing" as an escalated level of permission that apps need to request specifically.

They didn't because no one is trying to develop user friendly experiences, not Google, not particularly Apple, least of all the people who have been building the browsers. There is a long history of large companies trying to cram push notifications down our throat, starting with Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0. Publishers have wanted this since the dawn of personal computing, because their ultimate dream is to push advertising into your eyeballs without your explicit grant of permission.

Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them. (Truth be told it has never been a priority, they have always focused on "empowering developers," which really means empowering the publishers that those developers work for.) With phones and garbage like the ads in the Windows 10 Start menu, they finally achieved their dream and we're living in their dystopia today.

You know what they call advertising where the user decides when they receive it? QVC and junk mail. We have a century of advertising practice that is based on interruptions, and giving people control over the (commercial) information they receive is anathema to the entire industry.

> Apple, Google, and the people developing the modern Web platform have all failed utterly at preventing them.

Safari has a preference for "allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications" (you can also set it on a per-site basis.) iOS is scrupulous about requiring permission for notifications and allows you to configure their annoyingness (plus current iOS asks you if you still want notifications for particularly busy senders.)

> Truth be told it has never been a priority

I mean, it seems to be a priority for Apple in Safari and iOS.

I'd agree that Apple is the best of the pack right now and Mozilla is also making some improvements.

I think the web platform has a long way to go however -- considering what a low quality experience surfing the web can often be these days, it may already be too far gone.

I have heard it said that normal people don't use RSS but many power users still do.

I'm now on Netnewswire 5: https://nnw.ranchero.com/ and write a blog: http://jakeseliger.com that includes a lot of link posts. I still use RSS for all the original reasons, even if most of my friends look puzzled by the acronym "RSS." RSS still solves the "too many sites, too little time" problem extremely well, especially for occasionally updated blogs.

Heck, I only read your blog through RSS. Presumably at some point in the past I saw it, thought it was nifty, and added the feed. Haven't visited since.

Same goes for me for at least a 100 sites. I love the RSS feeds: would never consume the content without it.

Has NNW fixed the problem where the cache grows to several dozen gigs? If you're not sure, you may want to check to see how large your cache is.

Are you talking about the old version, the beta of the completely rewritten version, or the final release that was released 2 days ago?

The biggest problem with this model is a lot of RSS feeds only return the latest 5 or so items. So if you haven't opened your RSS reader in some time you might miss the other 10 items they published since you were last on. Google Reader was awesome because it solved this problem, but like all great things from Google it came with an expiration date.

There are some useful replacements to that Google Reader shaped hole in your heart. I'm a happy user of Newsblur, but I've heard nothing but good things for the others in the space like The Old Reader and Feedly.

I’m using TT-RSS to replace Google Reader. It’s easily self hosted and there are several compatible apps on Android and iOS.

I'm building a service that uses RSS. My solution to the problem is just to store every unique item in my database so I'll have a contiguous stream of articles.

Can you add Json RSS too please! :)

Possibly. JSON RSS is such a strange format though imo. A solution looking for a problem.

A Feed reader "requires" a server component, it's true that client-side only feed readers are very limited, unless you never leave you computer offline.

I'm a happy user of Miniflux (hosted myself), but there are many alternatives. https://miniflux.app/

I use Brief, a Firefox extension. It downloads items in the background while Firefox is open, which seems to be often enough that I don't miss anything.

Is there a way to auto-reject "show you notifications"? I don't ever see myself saying "Allow" to that pop-up.

Firefox has the option to "block new requests asking to allow notifications". Just check under Preferences > Privacy & Security > Permissions.

Most sites will show a custom box first, and only if you agree to that box, will they ask the browser to enable notifications. They do it so that they can ask you again if you deny, because responding “deny” to the real browser prompt blocks any future attempts.

Done, thanks! Glad I recently switched over from Chrome to Firefox on most of my systems. :-)

I don’t know about other browsers but you can turn that off inside Firefox‘s privacy settings.

> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry

More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.

If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.

FWIW, there are very few companies who go to as much lengths as Mozilla to optimize for user privacy in their approach to telemetry: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/testing-privacy-preserving...

Or, hear me out because will sound like crazy talk nowadays, you could simply listen to your users.

Most successful companies do both. Listening to your users is of course important, but it can't be a wholesale replacement for data driven aggregate behavior analysis because people have their own biases can forget things (and sometimes lie) and individual feedback can't be easily generalized to your entire population of users past a certain scale.

Web server logs, API call logs, etc don't go anywhere, though, even with 3rd party cookies and mouse movement tracking disabled.

Hmm, I wonder if a browser extension could redirect a web site's notifications to an RSS feed? This might be a good way to revive RSS.

I'm reminded about how some RSS readers support converting email newsletters to a feed.

Opera 12 had RSS built in and I used it a lot. It provided an icon in the address bar whenever a site included an RSS feed in the site's meta tags.