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
@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.
@fabio@RL_Dane@mozilla Chrome still has a Google supplied RSS extension. In addition if you append .rss to a mastodon url in Chrome it gives you the feed page, in Firefox it tries to download a file.
@skyportradio@RL_Dane the render-vs-download is something I’ve been struggling with for years.
And when I built my extension I also understood what causes it - and why some feeds are displayed on the page and others trigger a download dialog.
It boils down again to content type. RSS and Atom in theory have their own mimetypes, but for some reason Firefox interprets e.g. application/rss+xml as a type that can’t be rendered in the browser - hence triggering the download dialog, even if it’s semantically the right mimetype to use.
But you know what’s a type that just gets rendered as-is in the browser? That’s right, text/xml! And that’s why many feed providers have resorted to using that as the content type of their feeds - even if it’s semantically incorrect, or approximative at the very least, even folks on StackOverflow advise to just use that. Mastodon uses the right mimetype instead, hence the issue.
That’s why my extension tries to render the feed in two ways:
If it’s a text/xml, then it parses the document on the rendered page, no problema.
If it’s an application/* that would otherwise trigger a download, it intercepts the response headers, renders the response body on the fly, and it cancels the download dialog before it can start.
Again, I’m a coder so I know how to get my way around these limitations, but this shouldn’t be how a standard is implemented. More clarifications from @mozilla on why they implemented such feed-hostile policies would be welcome.
@fabio@RL_Dane@mozilla Thanks for the detailed explanation, from a user point of view it is just broken. I think I worked around it by copying the url +rss into a reader, but it's a pain.
@skyportradio@RL_Dane@mozilla I know, but my point is that, after looking under the hood, it almost looks like things were broken on purpose.
It’s not just about the feed icon. It’s about the whole support for a content type that used to work up to ~10 years ago being purposefully removed. And that’s why I think that some explanations are due - it was a deliberate business decision that needs to be motivated.
@RL_Dane@mozilla@thunderbird Perhaps to change the narrative so that an "AI" is "analyzing each web page visited by the user in real time" to "extract information about content summaries" and then displays it as a icon labeled "RSS"? RSS = Real Superintelligent System
But I'm not talking about adding an RSS reader to firefox. It never had one. I'm talking about restoring the RSS indicator so that people know that an RSS feed is available.
@RL_Dane@mozilla and make it work on mobile! It's easier to find RSS on computer but most of my new site discovery happen on my mobile and it's so painful working out if a feed exists to copy
@RL_Dane@mozilla Back when the Mozilla Suite split into Firefox and Thunderbird, RSS was no longer part of Firefox. I don't think adding it back to Firefox is a good choice because it was part of Thunderbird. Instead, I think improving RSS in Thunderbird like integrating the Firefox sync feature is the most realistic choice.
I think its very important to enhance discover ability, though. Firefox could have an option to forward the feed URL to your preferred RSS reader, including Thunderbird.
If the browser doesn't indicate when RSS is available, it won't ever get recognized as the killer feature it really is.
Also, while RSS reading might have been split off into Thunderbird, Firefox retained the ability to notify users of the presence of RSS feeds for a long time. Not sure exactly when it was removed, but it was definitely during the Firefox days.
@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.
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.
@alexhammy
A corporation? Certainly. Do they do everything right? Absolutely not. Are CEOs in general grossly overpaid and is mozilla no exception? Definitely.
Greedy? I don't see it. Wanting to make money doesn't make you greedy if you have a virtuous intention for it.
And controlling? Hell naw, man. If you want controlling, look at Apple, microsnot, google, and farcebook.
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