[bittermang]

Despite RSS' cult status among Hacker News readers, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that RSS is already dead. It's been dead. I would even go so far as to say it was dead on arrival, because the average user was never able to make any sense of it.

[captainmuon]

I am developing a little site which is a news aggregator and search engine for a certain niche topic. Out of a couple hundred sources, I'd say more than 95% support RSS, basically anything that uses wordpress or any blog or CMS system. I was really surprized how widespread it still is, and it makes my life a whole lot easier, since I don't have to scrape all those sites.

Maybe the model of subscribing to all your favorite blogs with a news reader didn't catch on, but RSS is still used a lot behind the scenes for other purposes.

[vntok]

You just wrote it is a little site for a niche topic. What you call widespread is not nearly as widespread as you think it is.

[JadeNB]

@captainmuon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683845) didn't say it was widespread in any absolute sense, only that he or she was surprised by how widespread it was.

[apostacy]

I keenly remember how 80% of websites wouldn't render properly in Firefox because they were all designed for IE6. You had no choice but to replicate the rendering bugs in IE6 if you wanted webpages to look good. But Firefox refused. They just focused on making an awesome browser, even if it wasn't appreciated. Even if users mistakenly blamed Firefox for webpages not rendering properly.

10 years ago Firefox flagrantly disregarded the "standards" of the day set out by Microsoft and Adobe, and instead made their own vision of what they thought the web should be, even if it was obscure and "unpopular". And even if it never caught on, and Microsoft had dominated, Firefox (then Firebird) would STILL have been awesome.

They quietly introduced RSS support, because it was a good feature for the browser to have, regardless of how many people use it. That's how I first learned about RSS. I loved Firefox and thought it was awesome that they were giving me access to this new feature.

That was back when adding new features was considered progress, instead of what we have now.

[bzbarsky]

> But Firefox refused.

This isn't quite true.

Firefox refused to do some things (explicitly violating some standards to fix some kinds of cosmetic issues, adding some APIs that seemed bad for users and the web). Firefox definitely did a bunch of other things to improve compat, including implementing various nonstandard IE6 features (XMLHttpRequest comes to mind!), matching IE6 rendering in various cases (see limited-quirks mode), etc, etc.

[Disclaimer: I was working on Firefox back then, and still am now; I've had to deal with a _lot_ of this firsthand.]

[apostacy]

You're right, they did have to make some compromises. But they also stood firm against some of the more egregious standards that Microsoft were trying to push.

Of course if Mozilla back then were like it is today, they would have been begging for donations so that they could support Microsoft Janus or RealPlayer or whatever garbage they were trying to impose on users back then, all so that their browser could be a second class citizen in the DRM ecosystem. It was really nice while it lasted, to have an organization that stood in opposition and provided an alternative to the commercialization of web technologies.

[bzbarsky]

> But they also stood firm against some of the more egregious standards that Microsoft were trying to push.

Can you give a specific example?

I'm not saying this wasn't happening; I just can't recall a case where it really mattered much in the end, in the sense that the standard was being pushed by Microsoft _and_ wanted by web developers, but active Firefox opposition killed it.

Now Firefox certainly _has_ done some things like that (e.g. pushing back on NaCl), but mostly by offering alternatives, not pushing back with just a "no". Because just saying "no" doesn't actually work that well in practice...

[JadeNB]

> [Disclaimer: I was working on Firefox back then, and still am now; I've had to deal with a _lot_ of this firsthand.]

I remember knowing you from UC and being surprised—I think when I saw your name in a changelog, perhaps—that someone I knew by chance was a part of the architecture of a project I loved (and love, albeit less passionately) so much. Thank you for your work!

[bzbarsky]

You're welcome!

[cJ0th]

RSS is not dead. I have many feeds that I auto-filter and check on a daily basis. Furthermore it is enabled by default on countless wordpress blogs. RSS is not complicated from an end user's point of view. But since it gives users more control to handle their information diet nobody poured money into a marketing campaign to make it more popular with "average users".

[Reedx]

As much as I love RSS (as someone that made and sold one of the first news aggregators), you're an outlier. If you asked 10 random people what RSS is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it?

Edit: Ok, I should reframe this. An anecdote or random sampling doesn't matter when Mozilla knows how much the feature was actually being used.

[cJ0th]

What's your point? A great technology should be abandoned just because it's not popular? Maybe I am not average but the fact is that RSS is very helpful to many professionals like programmers, scientists or journalists on a daily basis. What's the alternative? Should we manually skim e-mail newsletters that don't follow a strict structure? Should we all get our information off facebook? Should we waste our time checking a bunch if not hundreds of websites manually every day?

[Reedx]

I agree it has utility and not saying whether it should be abandoned or not. I just meant that an anecdote doesn't prove anything and doesn't necessarily apply to the average population. Mozilla knows better than we do.

[notatoad]

What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them?

I think RSS is cool too, but that's not an argument for why browsers should integrate RSS feeds in their menu structures. Whether RSS is dead or not isn't an argument as to whether firefox's live bookmarks feature should continue existing. People don't use it, so it got pulled.

[apostacy]

> What's your point? do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features[?]

YES. Yes even if not a single person uses it. If it makes sense and might be useful, and especially if it is already there, then it should stay.

I haven't used POP3 in about a decade, and only used FTP a few times in ten years, but I would be miffed if they were deprecated. I want the option to use them if I must. That availability is itself a feature. And RSS is a hell of a lot more useful and common.

And I know that if they remove it that there almost certainly wasn't a sound technical reason for it, it was just someone being judgmental about what features should be available.

Or, what about a spare tire? Isn't it wasteful that our cars are burdened with carrying around all this extra weight in the trunk? How many time in your life have you actually needed to use a spare tire? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that <5% of drivers ever even touch the thing, and yet every car has one! In this day and age, you should just call a tow truck. Spare tires a relic of the time before cellphones.

By your logic, the only features that are worthwhile are popular features. Nearly everything starts out with 0 users. Why bother making anything? Should something get axed the moment it dips in popularity? I know that these days the answer of course is yes.

FYI, the only reason that companies like Apple and Google are so aggressive with feature culling and deprecation is to protect their platforms and help dominate the market. That is it. When OSS copies the decisions of for profit companies then that is just a cargo cult mentality.

[roca]

Of course it doesn't make sense to drop support for a feature that has no users because it has only just been added. Fatures need time to find an audience. And of course a feature should not be axed as soon as its popularity dips. Those are straw-man arguments. But RSS is neither of those things. Firefox RSS support has been in the browser for a very long time and its popularity has declined over a very long time.

[roca]

Supporting even completely unused features creates significant costs, including:

-- Tests for those features still run regularly

-- Increased download size

-- Increased runtime code memory usage (it's impossible to completely separate code pages for unused features from used features)

-- The code must be maintained as interfaces they depend on are refactored

-- Attackers will find exploitable bugs that harm users and must be fixed

[bzbarsky]

> Or, what about a spare tire?

There's one spare tire. If cars were carrying around spares of 10 different things, you bet people would be looking into cutting some of them out.

There is a real cost in terms of technical debt, complexity, ease of maintenance, etc to having more features. The question then always becomes whether the features are worth the cost.

[JadeNB]

> YES. Yes even if not a single person uses it. If it makes sense and might be useful, and especially if it is already there, then it should stay.

By this argument, Pocket has to stay, and I hope that's at least not the universal sentiment. I want Mozilla to have a stripped-down core and be endlessly customiseable by add-ons; Mozilla themselves have drifted away from this vision, but I hope that their most passionate users won't!

> Or, what about a spare tire?

The argument isn't about whether you should have a spare tire, but whether the spare tire should come pre-installed by the manufacturer. You can buy another spare tire just like you can install an RSS add-on, or use a separate RSS reader.

[gbear605]

Ironically, some new cars nowadays aren't being sold with spare tires.

[zajd]

> do you think mozilla should continue including un-used features in their browser just because you like the technology that underpins them?

It's not unused, but sure, keep repeating that to yourself. And yes, they should continue including it. What exactly do they gain by removing it?

There's a reason Feedly has millions of users and it's not because RSS is dead and nobody cares.

[syockit]

> What exactly do they gain by removing it?

More developer resources?

[BuckRogers]

That's not a great argument. You could ask 10 random people anything about anything and they wouldn't know the answer. Ask your 10 people if they know about Chrome sync, once they fail, and they will, remove that feature too. And that one has the massive advantage of 60% marketshare.

With the standard you've setup, we'd remove almost every piece of technology around us. Our institutions and everything that consists of your way of life. Seriously. No one really studies liberal arts as a renaissance man anymore and knows about things around them, how they work, or how we got here.

There's a lot of things to be aware of today, if you want to be savvy and successful. People aren't even prepared to educate themselves, work a career or save for retirement. Of course they never bothered, once, to look into the features of the web browser.

I always try and always read or skim the manual, so to speak, because I've learned many things about even my iPhone that I kick myself for not finding out before that point. But that's not common for people to actively educate themselves.

RSS is amazing, and Mozilla certainly deserves to be labeled as Luddites for this.

[type0]

It strikes me as very hypocritical, especially coming from Mozilla who praises themselves as a savior of the free web technologies. It will do nothing other than harm the open web. More blogs, podcasts and artist will have the incentive to include Twitter and Facebook buttons where you will be able to "see the updates".

[BuckRogers]

It should've been clear to everyone when Mozilla acquired Pocket. They feel obligated to build that out with their zero vision. What they should be doing at this point, is retasking that team to finding new and creative ways to build upon RSS/Atom feeds and integrate them with the browser. I'm sure there's a lot of ideas that haven't been conceived.

How about just a simple feed that scrolls somewhere? Maybe even with transparency over a portion of your browser? Certainly would beat checking the Facebook feed. Those are just off the top of my head, if someone with half a spark of humanity within their mind sat down and worked on ways to advance free & open technologies, a lot could be done that hasn't been.

There's a lot to do, but Pocket should have nothing to do with it other than at most, being the name of possibly cloud storage for your RSS feeds that you want to read later. If they think they'll figure out a way to make Pocket some sort of killer feature and takeover Chrome's position in the market, I can't help but laugh.

[mentat]

If I asked 10 random people what IP is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it?

[taeric]

The usage metric from FF data is a solid spot to look.

Whether random folks know the technology is irrelevant. Ask 10 random people if they know what hyper text is, and you'll get bad answers. Doesn't mean people don't use or like it.

The shame here, is that Mozilla didn't push to get stuff like their homepage driven from RSS based feeds. They didn't get people using RSS, but they also didn't seem to try.

[MrEldritch]

For example: I have never used RSS, until relatively recently I was not actually sure exactly what RSS was (except that it had "something to do with blogs"), and wouldn't know what to do if I wanted to start using RSS without at least doing some Googling first.

[detaro]

Which is exactly why having stuff like this in the browser is useful: You don't know what RSS is, but you could discover and use Firefox's live bookmarks without knowing that. Mozilla hid this stuff, so it's no wonder usage rates are low, the question is if that's the correct way to take for an organization with Mozilla's goals.

[PhasmaFelis]

Your experience seems to be common, and I wonder what sort of critical marketing failure is responsible for that, because RSS is really straightforward: it shows you which of the blogs/webcomics/podcasts/etc. you follow have updated recently, in one place, without cramming up your email or bombarding you with alerts. It's like a Twitter/Tumblr homepage, but for the entire web.

It's not like trying to explain what Google Wave is for; it's no more difficult than getting started on Twitter. It's really strange to me that it's still such a Here Be Dragons thing.

[naravara]

Even in the heyday of RSS 10 random people were unlikely to know what it was. It was always a niche technology but it’s primary niche was specifically people who were influential parts of internet culture and the blogosphere. This included the HackerNews demo, but also bloggers, journalists, and entertainers.

It’s not a mass market feature, but the market is serves has ripple effects. Because of that, though, the people using it are likely to prefer better, more robust tools rather than the neglected offerings built into the browser.

[Karunamon]

I'm not sure "random people" are the target market for RSS.

[jrnichols]

Users could make sense of it, but advertisers couldn't capitalize on it to shove ads at your eyeballs.

what I noticed as stabbing rss in the back was Google embracing and then eventually extinguishing Reader.

[BuckRogers]

Bingo. It's not driving revenue, it drives quality content (or at least click bait titles but that's going to be there regardless), so it has to go. Thankfully WordPress will keep this alive, it's probably a more significant factor behind RSS adoption than any browser.

[PhasmaFelis]

> the average user was never able to make any sense of it.

By that metric, Bitcoin is also dead.

There are multiple for-profit RSS reader services. I follow a really unreasonable number of webcomics, and I've seen one, ever, that didn't have an RSS feed. "Niche audience" is not the same as "dead".

(I've honestly never understood why people find RSS so confusing. You sign up to Feedly or whatever, and you choose creators you want to follow. It's not dramatically different than getting started on Twitter.)

[Larrikin]

This saddens me as I didn't have much need for RSS when Google Reader was around. Currently my news apps keep "learning" what I like and have become increasingly useless so I signed up for Feedly to create a less filtered feed of things I actually am interested in. The RSS support in Firefox has been great in helping me find feeds to add.

[jtbayly]

Have you any idea how popular podcasts are these days?

[zouhair]

I have tons of scripts that use RSS feeds, I don't know what you are talking about. I even use Feed43[0] to generate RSS feeds for sites with no RSS.

[0]: https://feed43.com/

[chiefalchemist]

This is the crux, isn't it? We might even say it was dead when they named it RSS. That wasn't consumer friendly enough.

The general idea was certainly sound. But as much as publishers offered it they were never comfortable (read: in favor of) so much of their contented being consimed without a visit, or at the very least without any analytics. Total feed subscribers just wasn't good enough.

[zanny]

Users shouldn't have needed to know the name. They should have just seen the logo, clicked it, and been magically subscribed through whatever their reader of choice is. In most cases that is and was how it worked... works.

The problem was always getting users on board with it. From inception the kind of person that would struggle to use RSS and lead to its eventual downfall was using webmail and thought their browser was the entire PC besides Solitare back in the early 2000s. For them, getting some arcane "where should we open this link" when you clicked a subscribe button with the RSS logo completely shut them down. I'm not sure if Firefox's "live bookmarks" ever worked intuitively.

Add on to that I'm not sure if IE or Safari ever supported RSS, had a reader, or anything of the ilk and it was DOA. The remotely informed user would have just used Google Reader, but there was no mechanism (and I don't think there even is one today?) to transparently feed RSS links into a webapp reader.

I know at at least one point Firefox was defaulting RSS to Google Reader, but I don't think IE or Safari ever did, and that was at least 60% of the browser market at the time not providing a usable experience for a syndication format. Thats how it ends up dead on arrival.

[chiefalchemist]

> "Users shouldn't have needed to know the name."

How would they communicate with each other about it then? These things don't expand in a vacuum. Perhaps not in a modern social media sense, but there is always a network effect.

Calling it RSS was too plain and too clinical.

[taeric]

This is the elephant in the room here. With google reader, they actually had a good integration with google buzz so that I could have a small social circle around some posts. I could put a comment on an RSS item and my friends and I could have a conversation on it.

Then, they killed it hoping to get everyone discussing things in a plus feed. Something I have no interest in. Especially because I can't really see the discussions in my email.

Which is ultimately what is killing things here. Many of us built up real workflows for correspondence using email. It works great for that. Instead of trying to help build on these correspondence workflows, companies would rather find ways of owning that correspondence, such that now I have to use Facebook or Google Plus or whatever in order to have basic back and forths with friends/family/strangers.

[chiefalchemist]

Agreed. That said the typical email UI could easily become an RSS reader.

- Sender = publisher / source - Subject = title + author - Body = body

The same can be said for SMS.

Shifting the email client to a one-stop comms dashboard would make a lot of sense (to me). Add in drag & drop to a TODO list(s) and I'm more effective and happier.

[contextfree]

IE had a reader (introduced in IE7 I think). There was some sort of support in Outlook as well.

[sergers]

RSS feeds still in Outlook, but it's the first feature I disable.

Don't need unused folders in my mail directory trees.

[SimeVidas]

I follow 561 RSS feeds on feedly.com. Pretty much every site I care about provides an RSS feed, and adding one is not that hard (one site even added one today, on my request).

So, I don’t agree that RSS is dead.

[htwillie]

Perhaps RSS wasn't built for the average user.