Mozilla Kills Live Bookmarks, RSS Feed Subscriptions in Firefox 64

Megalith

Megalith

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A software engineer at Mozilla has bad news for Firefox users who have enjoyed its built-in RSS support: that functionality is being terminated from Firefox 64 onwards. More specifically, the built-in feed preview feature, subscription UI, and “live bookmarks” are being removed from the core browser. RSS/Atom feed support will now be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.

By virtue of being baked into the core of Firefox, these features have long had outsized maintenance and security costs relative to their usage. Making sure these features are as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would take a surprising amount of engineering work, and unfortunately the usage of these features does not justify such an investment: feed previews and live bookmarks are both used in around 0.01% of sessions.
 
as a programmer i'm happy to see this sort of decision-making. when you're refactoring code and you run into some old crusty corner of the codebase... it's really nice to be able to weigh the cost of development against a priority like usage.

plus - shrinking the codebase? excellent! if you use these features, add-ons are the way to roll imo
 
Guess I'll go back to chrome then, this was all I was using firefox for.
 
Messy said:
as a programmer i'm happy to see this sort of decision-making. when you're refactoring code and you run into some old crusty corner of the codebase... it's really nice to be able to weigh the cost of development against a priority like usage.

plus - shrinking the codebase? excellent! if you use these features, add-ons are the way to roll imo
Click to expand...

I tend to agree, and firefox in the last year or so has been back on track in my mind. The renewed focus on the core browser itself has paid off. That oddball period of just shuffling the UI and bundling strange things was not awesome.
 
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The only use I had for RSS was the built-in bookmarks for BBC News.

So long, live bookmarks, I guess. Not too big of a loss.
 
I've never used lived bookmarks, outside trying that "Active Desktop" thing back on Windows 95 + ie4. RSS is nice, but I've always preferred to go looking rather than having information pushed on me. Website notifications is the new RSS I think, and I always pick the never option.

Nexus6 said:
Guess I'll go back to chrome then, this was all I was using firefox for.
Click to expand...
You're part of the 0.01% percent!
 
I was getting tired of FF not working on a few sites so I tried Edge and Chrome. I didn't realize nobody else had autoplay video blocking. I read Edge is supposed to get it in the October update so I might try it again.
 
Messy said:
as a programmer i'm happy to see this sort of decision-making. when you're refactoring code and you run into some old crusty corner of the codebase... it's really nice to be able to weigh the cost of development against a priority like usage.

plus - shrinking the codebase? excellent! if you use these features, add-ons are the way to roll imo
Click to expand...

I agree on the principle, but find it hard to believe there aren't other more useless features that could be culled first. People actually used RSS, it made sense, it was simple, it worked.

But there's no ad revenue, so that's where it ended. Let's be real here.
 
The expression on their faces says it all

Untitled-1.jpg
 
So, guess I'm one of the rare ones. The automatic instant previewing of Firefox... well, there just isn't any add-on that I've found that does it.... despite what they say. I think Mozilla assumed that the only thing they had was feed subscription... it's the preview thing that was pretty unique.

It's weird, but Safari may end up with the better experience now. Since we use the feature, I had to test which browsers (even with add-ons) would work the best. Firefox was (emphasis on was) the best.
 
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