RSS is not dead. I have many feeds that I auto-filter and check on a daily basis. Furthermore it is enabled by default on countless wordpress blogs. RSS is not complicated from an end user's point of view. But since it gives users more control to handle their information diet nobody poured money into a marketing campaign to make it more popular with "average users".
As much as I love RSS (as someone that made and sold one of the first news aggregators), you're an outlier. If you asked 10 random people what RSS is, how many would have any idea what it is or how to use it?
Edit: Ok, I should reframe this. An anecdote or random sampling doesn't matter when Mozilla knows how much the feature was actually being used.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's not a great argument. You could ask 10 random people anything about anything and they wouldn't know the answer. Ask your 10 people if they know about Chrome sync, once they fail, and they will, remove that feature too. And that one has the massive advantage of 60% marketshare.
With the standard you've setup, we'd remove almost every piece of technology around us. Our institutions and everything that consists of your way of life. Seriously. No one really studies liberal arts as a renaissance man anymore and knows about things around them, how they work, or how we got here.
There's a lot of things to be aware of today, if you want to be savvy and successful. People aren't even prepared to educate themselves, work a career or save for retirement. Of course they never bothered, once, to look into the features of the web browser.
I always try and always read or skim the manual, so to speak, because I've learned many things about even my iPhone that I kick myself for not finding out before that point. But that's not common for people to actively educate themselves.
RSS is amazing, and Mozilla certainly deserves to be labeled as Luddites for this.
It strikes me as very hypocritical, especially coming from Mozilla who praises themselves as a savior of the free web technologies. It will do nothing other than harm the open web. More blogs, podcasts and artist will have the incentive to include Twitter and Facebook buttons where you will be able to "see the updates".
It should've been clear to everyone when Mozilla acquired Pocket. They feel obligated to build that out with their zero vision. What they should be doing at this point, is retasking that team to finding new and creative ways to build upon RSS/Atom feeds and integrate them with the browser. I'm sure there's a lot of ideas that haven't been conceived.
How about just a simple feed that scrolls somewhere? Maybe even with transparency over a portion of your browser? Certainly would beat checking the Facebook feed. Those are just off the top of my head, if someone with half a spark of humanity within their mind sat down and worked on ways to advance free & open technologies, a lot could be done that hasn't been.
There's a lot to do, but Pocket should have nothing to do with it other than at most, being the name of possibly cloud storage for your RSS feeds that you want to read later. If they think they'll figure out a way to make Pocket some sort of killer feature and takeover Chrome's position in the market, I can't help but laugh.
The usage metric from FF data is a solid spot to look.
Whether random folks know the technology is irrelevant. Ask 10 random people if they know what hyper text is, and you'll get bad answers. Doesn't mean people don't use or like it.
The shame here, is that Mozilla didn't push to get stuff like their homepage driven from RSS based feeds. They didn't get people using RSS, but they also didn't seem to try.
For example: I have never used RSS, until relatively recently I was not actually sure exactly what RSS was (except that it had "something to do with blogs"), and wouldn't know what to do if I wanted to start using RSS without at least doing some Googling first.
Which is exactly why having stuff like this in the browser is useful: You don't know what RSS is, but you could discover and use Firefox's live bookmarks without knowing that. Mozilla hid this stuff, so it's no wonder usage rates are low, the question is if that's the correct way to take for an organization with Mozilla's goals.
Your experience seems to be common, and I wonder what sort of critical marketing failure is responsible for that, because RSS is really straightforward: it shows you which of the blogs/webcomics/podcasts/etc. you follow have updated recently, in one place, without cramming up your email or bombarding you with alerts. It's like a Twitter/Tumblr homepage, but for the entire web.
It's not like trying to explain what Google Wave is for; it's no more difficult than getting started on Twitter. It's really strange to me that it's still such a Here Be Dragons thing.
Even in the heyday of RSS 10 random people were unlikely to know what it was. It was always a niche technology but it’s primary niche was specifically people who were influential parts of internet culture and the blogosphere. This included the HackerNews demo, but also bloggers, journalists, and entertainers.
It’s not a mass market feature, but the market is serves has ripple effects. Because of that, though, the people using it are likely to prefer better, more robust tools rather than the neglected offerings built into the browser.
