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by smusamashah
853 days ago
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Unlike other browsers at the time, why was it decided not to even read RSS xml files and show them like a nice page like other browsers? Even now RSS shows up as raw xml. Edit: reread your comment. I guess it was because this could be done using an extension. I believe this to be the main reason for lowering adoption / use of RSS with rise of chrome. To this date chrome shows raw xml when you open RSS xml while other browsers give you something interesting and readable to look at and even let you subscribe to that interesting page. |
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Chrome was a no-crunch 50-person project, which sounds like a lot until you think about how we were porting webkit to windows, adding a sandbox, creating a new javascript engine, a new windows UI toolkit, etc and we were ruthless about prioritization - any engineer who could've spent on an RSS renderer would've been taken away from valuable webkit windows compatibility work (omg ACID tests), and weeks mattered.
Second, we had an extremely strong belief in letting developers own as much as they could - our impossible ideal was that the Chrome UI wouldn't exist and developers would just create content you could access emphemerally through your operating system. At the time, we had seen that it was possible for developers to use various trickery (XSLT or CSS?) to style RSS feeds so they would show up somewhat like how you described (IIRC Feedburner did this)
So if you take those two things together (and again I may be misremembering) you see it being a "developers can do it so if they care they can do it, we should not spend time making something that overrules them"
It's not possible for me to know whether that was the right idea in hindsight because I don't know what we would've sacrificed (I think I would've preferred using that time to make the standalone image renderer have better zooming/panning controls)