Why was RSS support removed from Firefox?
Up until Firefox 64, Firefox had limited support for RSS:
- Viewing a RSS feed would show you the feed items, with an option to do something with the feed.
- Live bookmarks would actually subscribe to those feeds
I can understand removing Live Bookmarks. It's a big feature. I don't understand removing the (what I assume to be) XSLT stylesheet that made RSS feeds not look like a wall of XML. Does anybody know what the conversation was here? Are there minutes?
Even basic RSS support helps people interact with the web, and since Chrome and Firefox both dumped RSS, users are being driven further and further into the arms of "Platforms" who handle this stuff through black-box algorithms. And so much tracking.
Mozilla should reverse this one. Bring RSS back hard.
All Replies (4)
Found this:
https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/
While this gives some insight into the perceived engineering problems, it's really surprising that a little XSLT wasn't considered viable. The rationale that people will use extensions is so malformed. How do people even know they need to get an extension if Firefox isn't telling them?
I use 60.9.0esr and prevent updates. Then I can use Rss.
I also downloaded that to a laptop and also got into settings to prevent updates. But it always "updates" there to something like 68.12 which does not have rss.
What is the latest oldest version of Firefox which has rss ?
There are extensions that support RSS in Firefox.