Mozilla engineers are preparing to remove one of the Firefox browser's oldest features —its built-in support for RSS and Atom feeds, and inherently, the "Live Bookmarks" feature.
All Firefox users are probably well accustomed to this feature, albeit not many have ever used it.
This feature powers the browser's ability to detect when users are accessing an RSS/Atom feed and then show a special page that lets them subscribe to the feed with a custom feed reader or the browser's built-in "Live Bookmarks" feature.
All Live Bookmarks are also stored in the browser's Bookmarks section and can be added to the Bookmarks Toolbar (like in the image below).
They work by showing the latest ten articles published on a site's RSS/Atom feed and letting the user access them with a click.
Built-in feed support, Live Bookmarks to be removed this year
But in a recent discussion on the company's bug tracker, Mozilla engineers said they plan to remove feed support sometime later this year, with the release of Firefox 63 or Firefox 64 —scheduled for October and December, respectively.
"After careful consideration of various options (which also included doing nothing, or investing heavily in updating the code), we've decided to go ahead and remove builtin feed support from Firefox," said Gijs Kruitbosch, an engineer on the Firefox browser.
The Mozilla team is already set in its decision and has even drafted a blog post for the official announcement. In this unpublished document, engineers share more of the reasons that led to the decision to remove Firefox's built-in feed support and Live Bookmarks utility.
◉ Live Bookmarks doesn't work well with Firefox Sync
◉ Live Bookmarks is not available for Android or iOS and has no mobile integration
◉ Doesn't work well with podcast types of feeds
◉ Only 0.1% of the Firefox userbase uses Live Bookmarks
◉ Outdated and hard to maintain code (last update was 7 years ago)
◉ Uses its own custom code for various tasks instead of reusing Firefox's current libraries
"These features had an outsized maintenance and security impact relative to their usage," the draft announcement said. "Making these features as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would have cost significant time and effort, and the usage of these features doesn’t justify such an investment.
Users advised to use a dedicated feed reader
Mozilla says that when it will remove feed support and Live Bookmarks from Firefox, the browser will export the user's RSS/Atom feeds as an OPML file that users can later import into a specialized desktop or web-based feed reader.
Firefox engineers didn't volunteer to port the Live Bookmarks feature as a WebExtension-compatible add-on, but don't be surprised if the Firefox community does this instead.
Firefox's built-in feed reader was once ported as a Chrome extension a few years back, and at least one user has offered to port that Chrome extension back as a Firefox add-on.
Comments
chilinux - 5 years ago
Mozilla Foundation seems to have more interest in the needs of their commercial subsidiary Mozilla Corporation than in providing open and transparent features to users. The close source server services of Mozilla Corporation's ownership of Pocket provides a $5 per month per user conflict of interest. Efforts by Mozilla Foundation to continue to directly develop or improve bookmark related synchronization had been greatly cut back or killed off ever since their involvement in integrating Pocket directly into Firefox. At the same time, members of the Mozilla Foundation have failed to give any detailed explanation on how this behavior is consistent with the Mozilla Manifesto. To this day, key members of the Mozilla Foundation still claim that the Mozilla Manifesto (which they abandoned following) is what helps differentiate Firefox from other browsers like Chrome.
Lastly, it seems completely flawed to follow the "logical" reasoning that they let the feature development stagnate for so long that no one ever bothers to use it so it is safe to just gut.
UG26 - 5 years ago
I dont know why the removal of RSS support is a problem. This is an example of feature bloat -- that functionality is not widely used, and should be optional when there are much nicer dedicated clients. And it's still in Thunderbird, by the way:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs