Dear @mozilla
Please, please, please put the RSS indicator back in Firefox.
People need to know about this technology which empowers users over greedy, controlling corporations.
Update: As many have pointed out, you *can* use @thunderbird as an RSS feed reader, and there are many #firefox add-ons to restore the RSS indicator (one of which I'm already using). But my point is that Firefox needs to lean into RSS as an answer to all the crap that is the modern web, and help educate users about it
Whoa, I haven't had a post blow up like this in a long time.
@RL_Dane @vwbusguy @topher @mozilla
Thunderbird has to become a good RSS reader first, currently it's a pretty awful one — there is no way to make it display article images next to summary, which turns navigation into scrolling endless characterless lines. Reader mode that is present in FF is somehow not in TB — where it would be most useful.
And I won't even mention endless bugs: frequent crashes when you have lots of feed sources and DB corruption of RSS account when you attempt to sort them.
@vwbusguy
Well, it certainly can act as an RSS reader, I'm not denying that and I'm using it myself — for RSS too. But how does it fare compared to what you expect from a modern RSS reader?
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the same blog, what is easier to navigate in your opinion?
And I'm not some GUI freak, but if I wanted just lines of text, I'd pick some lightweight TUI program, not this juggernaut that can eat 1,5 gigs of RAM easily.
@RL_Dane @topher @mozilla
@vwbusguy
And this is "Cards View" — thing that was added relatively recently, it was even worse before it.
To read the articles themselves right now I have to resort to uBO and dozens of CSS hacks to make them readable — yep, it sure isn't Thunderbird's fault that websites do not give you article's content right in RSS feed and you have to open the website, but — Firefox already has "Reader mode" adding it to TB shouldn't be rocket surgery
@RL_Dane @topher @mozilla
@RL_Dane
Oh, yes, that I completely agree with — just a button so that URL with RSS scheme could be opened in a reader of your choice and added to the list of subscriptions in a more straightforward way would already be helpful.
I have no idea why this was removed — looks like a minimal maintenance feature to me.
It always surprises me when I open e.g. Safari in Mac OS X 10.4 — and RSS is everywhere, it used to be pretty big. Should definitely be brought back!
@RL_Dane I fully agree! For now though, I'm using this and it seems pretty good https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
@dosch @soundasleep @RL_Dane Something's likely wrong with your Firefox installation. Check for any unwanted addons
@dosch
Do you have a user-agent switcher? If so, set it back to Firefox temporarily or set it to disable automatically on https://addons.mozilla.org/
@soundasleep @RL_Dane
@Parienve bah, indeed; the bug sits behind the keyboard: I changed user agent some weeks ago for a website testing. And forgot about that
It never had one. It just displays the feed as a generic XML file. But the RSS button let you know the feed was available, and you could copy the URL and paste it into your reader/aggregator.
@RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla I use Inoreader and don’t actually need that icon…. On the one hand, reminder is good; but on the other hand - unnecessary overloading of the interface (said the person with 100500 addons). RSS needs to be promoted in a more obvious way.
@johan @RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla I don’t know, I can relate to this but I wondered for so much time where did the RSS icon end up
In the end if we don’t find space for such an icon on the UI we are condemned to look for the same icon in websites. I know Inoreader for example can scrape the page and grab the feed, but it always felt a little bit arcane to me
@RL_Dane Firefox did have dynamic bookmarks, which could be used as a primitive RSS reader. But that's long gone, along with the RSS indicator.
@RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla
Not true. It had a UI for RSS, and it could subscribe to feeds as bookmark folders.
@nik @RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla This was an Add-On, wasn't it? It just can not recall the name anymore.
@lespocky @RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla
No, it was built-in until Firefox 64:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migration
@RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla It also used XDG open (Or similar mechanism) to allow the user to launch the RSS feed/import it into their reader of choice.
@RL_Dane @cubeofcheese @mozilla live bookmarks, Mozilla Firefox had live bookmarks for years and I used them quite a bit
@cubeofcheese @RL_Dane @mozilla Thunderbird does.
@SiteRelEnby @RL_Dane @mozilla This is also when they killed Live Bookmarks. The support page they launched, linking to RSS add-ons as an alternative… at first just pointed to incredibly unrelated extensions. It's like they *did not understand what RSS is*, which is frankly worrying for a project fighting for an open web.
@RL_Dane
I figure if/when you migrate the 1.5k followers on this account to Polymaths it'd happen more often again. ;)
@RL_Dane re: your edit:
Instead they're like "We're developing 'trustworthy AI'! Also we just laid of 5% of our developers and are putting less resources into our mastodon instance among other projects. UwU"
@RL_Dane @mozilla Yes!! I had opened this once: http://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/subscribe-to-a-website/idc-p/39707 – The idea was to re-instaure the button (with a label that makes it clear what it does for discoverability, for instance by calling it “Subscribe” or “Follow this website”, and having a minimal feed reader within Firefox itself.
@nclm @RL_Dane @mozilla with WordPress adding federated ActivityPub support to all sites hosted on werdpress.com and 42K authors already using it to publish 4.5mil posts, I'd like to suggest adding an option to follow a site via Mastodon at the browser level instead of adding an increasing number of social icons to the page. Add the additional follow options like AtivityPub to the existing RSS link to the page metadata.
@RL_Dane they are busy working on tab previews
@RL_Dane @mozilla I am using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/ addon to the rescue but native support would be better.
@RL_Dane I made an extension a while ago that does exactly that - it puts the feed icon back in the URL bar.
Plus, it renders application/rss+xml
, application/atom+xml
and friends in a readable way when you open a feed URL in your browser - there was a time when browsers used to handle these content types, nowadays they just return the raw XML.
It’d be interesting if the folks at @mozilla have more insights on why they decided to drop the feed icon indicator in the URL bar as well as the support for rendering feed mimetypes - and why the timing of these decisions approximately matched the timing when Chrome dropped their support for those features.