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by m4xm4n 1631 days ago
as other's pointed out, RSS is still here if you want to use it. It's just not ubiquitous as it once was.

IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.

But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.

Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well

4 comments

My solution to this was getting a miniflux.app subscription and pinning the tab/setting it as my home page. I got directly to this page via an RSS feed.
This is _exactly_ why I created Feeder, an RSS extension for Chrome. In 2010 I wanted to switch from Firefox but was hooked on live bookmarks.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...

I remember using this! I liked it and used it for a while! But not having it in the bookmarks bar, I kept forgetting about my feeds :/ and then I stopped installing it. I'm sorry :( Glad to hear it's still going strong though. Maybe I'll give it another shot!
Vivaldi has support for RSS feeds now. Vivaldi has been getting better and better. I urge anyone who hasn't tried it in the last year or two to check it out. It's the new Opera.
IMO, RSS as a browser feature was dead pretty much as soon as smartphones happened (and desktop<>mobile RSS sync didn't).