[smusamashah]

When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline of RSS.

[johannes1234321]

There are three additional reasons:

* Google Reader is often cited as the best RSS Reader but was killed, which reduced amount of users (I never used it, thus can't judge it)

* Many publishers want people to go to their site, thus don't provide full feeds, only headlines and limit it in additional ways.

* People went to Twitter and Facebook as their news aggregators, depending on the social graph to preselect "relevant" news.

Aside I think the pure list of entries only works to a limited degree for news sites: in RSS all articles are equal, but for news many people want to see the "main" news highlighted as on a news page. For some of my feeds on some news days the feed is barely usable when they push a main story combined with different detail articles, making it hard to find the main story (for instance on election day there is a main article for summary and then bunch of articles for different districts, different parties, ... which appear equal while they aren't equal, also the article with first results is already outdated and replaced ...)

[addicted]

> Google Reader is often cited as the best RSS Reader but was killed

1. Google Reader was not necessarily the best reader. The anger and frustration with the handling of Google Reader lies in the fact that Google Reader was the first reader from a major tech company. That essentially killed all the other innovation in this space and then Google Reader was itself killed in such a short span that there wasn’t an opportunity to have a smooth transition for the entire industry with it.

2. The one spade that did see a lot of competition growth and innovation were off-web RSS clients (precisely because Google Reader wasn’t a player in this space). But even these were completely handicapped by the elimination of Google Reader because Google Reader has become the de facto syncing solution for your RSS list and read states, etc. Again, the short time between announcement and end of life meant many of the popular clients couldn’t find a smooth transition for their users.

3. Google Reader had a social network effect component where someone could publish RSS articles they were reading and others could subscribe to their feed. In this sense it almost acted as an alternative to Twitter. The Twitter implosion has shown exactly how hard it is for alternatives to a social network to arise (because you invariably get many alternatives and it’s hard to get everyone onto one).

And the RSS reader social network space was nascent so the fragmentation as a result of the destruction of Google Reader meant a lot of people migrated to Twitter instead (Google had hoped they would migrate to Google+ instead but Google+ was awful so that didn’t happen).

[rightbyte]

RSS is the antithesis to the interest of link aggregators like Google. It is no accident they didn't support it properly.

[pluc]

Does nobody remember that RSS integration with browser (Firefox Live Bookmarks anyone?) was spectacular before Chrome showed up? They easily could have integrated it a hundred different times a hundred different ways. They didn't. They've even shut their own RSS reader. They don't want content to be available to your standards, they want it available to advertisers'.

[rchaud]

RSS readers had limited javascript support, which meant ads wouldn't show. Guess who sells more website ad inventory than anyone else?

[TazeTSchnitzel]

And since then, the other browsers have removed their native RSS/Atom feed support. Firefox and Safari both used to have it and have since removed it. Visiting an RSS feed in Safari now shows you a page that resembles a 404, telling you that Safari no longer supports feeds.

[b112]

Yup. For firefox, having features that chrome doesn't, seems silly to them. It's not like they need market share or anything! Just remove fully functional, mature and feature complete code, cause why not?

No FTP, RSS, etc.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

FTP is the one that really annoys me. It was a minimal implementation which would let me download a few ad hoc files as required. Now I have to launch a separate program every time.

At least with RSS, I can manually parse the XML in a pinch.

[latexr]

> Visiting an RSS feed in Safari now shows you a page that resembles a 404, telling you that Safari no longer supports feeds.

For me it shows an alert asking if I want to subscribe in my installed feed reader.

[outofpaper]

It's both odd and appalling.

Safari "development" is such an odd bag of changes. I sill miss the old dashboard widget maker that let you select a section of just about any page and use it as a widget.

[ascagnel_]

And if you don't have a feed reader installed, that modal will send you to the App Store, with "RSS" as the search term (at least on macOS).

[al_borland]

I have to wonder if it just never caught on with the mainstream as average users didn't really get it? Apple went so far as to name a release of their browser, "Safari RSS" [1]. Even with this level of focus from Apple, I never really heard anyone talk about it or start using it. Those who already used RSS had better readers, and those who didn't use RSS never really saw the value with this implementation.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/1671/9

[smusamashah]

Having an RSS indicator in the URL bar used to be the first step to subscribing a feed. How do you get it if its not there. When a feature is removed, slowly everyone will forget that it was even a thing once.

Opera (my main browser back then) use to have so much stuff built in (RSS, email, IRC, note taking, mouse gestures). Chrome use to have a resizable extension bar recently. OneNote use to have a more colorful and compact UI. Start menu and taskbar used to be useful before windows 11/10/8.

Reminds of an article posted here about removing less used keys/letters from keyboard. https://www.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock/

[al_borland]

“Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall”

Apple has done this with their laptops. When you plug them in, open the laptop, or press any key on the keyboard, they boot up.

I shut mine down to clean over the keyboard area and it kept booting up on me. It was extremely frustrating and there is no setting to simply turn it off.

I found this…

“Press and hold the left Control and Command buttons with the right Shift button for a total of 7 seconds. Without releasing them, press the Power button and hold them all together for an additional 7 seconds. Your Mac can only be powered on by using the Power button.”

I haven’t tried it, but it apparently only works as a one-off, so this silly process would need to be done each time the user wants the system to stay off.

Considering the laptops still have a power button, this seems crazy to me. Maybe they are preparing to remove it.

[Barrin92]

Vivaldi has that built in and a good RSS reader as well. Still very useful.

[riidom]

I use Vivaldi to detect the RSS and grab the URL, but actually have my RSS in Thunderbird. Back in the days of good Opera, I had mail, chat, RSS all inside the browser. But for some reason I couldn't get back to that when Vivaldi finally released the mail beta.

So not saying Vivaldi's RSS is bad, mostly want to mention that Thunderbird can do RSS too, if one happens to use it anyway.

[Kalabasa]

Meanwhile Chrome mobile seems to be bringing it back again, although it's now called "Following" a site. Not sure if it uses RSS under the hood.