[apostacy]

How could including support for a technology possibly harm users? What is with this obsession with scrubbing any features that are not "popular" enough?

This mindset comes from for-profit companies. It makes sense for them to obsess about metrics and engagement. But what are you losing by challenging users and making something good?

So much amazing and important software has poor engagement with uneducated users, but it would be considered worthless garbage because it isn't popular with users who don't care in the first place.

[Baeocystin]

All code has a cost, and all code needs to be maintained. It is not as simple as you might think to just leave something in.

[naravara]

Not only this, but having a default and free option built in disincentivizes the kind of experimentation and creative destruction that could develop the platform. Especially if the technology itself isn’t a priority for making the browser.

This is basically how Google hobbled RSS and why it’s on life support today. Reader was great and free. It got cannibalized for their erstwhile social networking bid and the entire ecosystem nearly died when it went away because it had the market cornered.

[yawaramin]

Wait, what? You're comparing FF's bare-bones live feeds feature to Google Reader? They are night and day. Live bookamrks were meant to be a bare minimum, a starting point for users to get a feel for RSS. No one in their right mind would say they were discouraging competition and experimentation. As evidence: all the great RSS readers (NetNewsWire, Reader, Feedly, etc.) were created while live bookmarks still existed.

[apostacy]

I do not believe that it is too expensive to Mozilla to support RSS. If you had to quantify the cost in a dollar amount, it would probably be far less than the money that they spend on single one of their promotional events.