[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.

[apostacy]

> "audience"

What "audience"? Why are you using that nomenclature? This is not an entertainment product, nor is it for-profit software. So why do you care about building an audience and a brand? How about instead we make actually good software.

[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

[apostacy]

We are talking about the RSS reader. How many extra megabytes do you think it will add to the download?

[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?