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Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

It's understandable that this is done, given the usage numbers. I've never really used live bookmarks in the past 10 years, but I always had the 'feed' navigation button appear if a site has a feed.

It still saddens me, because it's another nail in the coffin for an important technology. It's technologies like Atom/RSS that once broke us out of silos. We're back in the silo though, and I would love Mozilla to lead the front in breaking us out again.

Maybe it's not RSS and Atom that lead us into the next revolution. Maybe it's activityfeed? I want it badly though.

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First of all some of us use RSS just fine. And RSS is in fact still mainstream, at least for podcasts.

I don't use Firefox's live bookmarks. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that Firefox has a "Subscribe to RSS" button and you can register your own RSS Reader such that Firefox can directly subscribe your RSS Reader when it finds a RSS link in the page's HTML. I hope that doesn't go away and right now I'm assuming that it does.

And to contradict you ... no, it's in no way understandable. I understood many choices from Mozilla, even their integration of Pocket which I like, or their integration of DRM, which I assume they had no choice in the matter. But not this.

If popularity is an actual argument, with complete disregard for that percentage of users that cares about RSS, then we should just switch to Chrome. Chrome has an extension in its app store btw that does what I want. I might as well switch to Chrome now and be done with it.

Mozilla would do well to appeal to the long tail, they can't afford not to.

The people most likely to use these features I imagine are also the ones most likely to turn off telemetry. Making decisions to remove long-standing features based on telemetry seems short-sighted to me because of this reason.

Also the ones most likely to be able to install an extension to do the same job.

That said, if you want Mozilla (or other organisations, for that matter) to make decisions based on how you're using their products, then it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation from their side that you tell them about that usage, i.e. through telemetry.

It's a trust issue. Too many companies cannot be trusted to make software that truly, effectively, anonymizes data before it leaves your device. I trust Mozilla, but I understand others don't. And it's part of the way that we lose trust in general when abuse is so common.

There are other means of getting usage data than just telemetry. Depending on it when you know some percentage of your userbase has turned it off is disregarding those users completely.

At the same time, people disable telemetry because as we've come to understand much more clearly as a society (and some of us already knew long before "recently"), there is too much data floating around about us as it is. Not all of it stored in a secured, anonymized fashion even if the organization in question claims to. People are skeptical of automatic telemetry data collection for good reason.

As I said in another comment: this is a valid concern, but not one that has a better way to deal with it other than what Mozilla is doing now, i.e. ignoring telemetry-disabled users. Or at least, there's no better way of dealing with that that I know of.

Except that telemetry is no open-ended conversation where I can present suggestions.

It's more them asking specific questions for preexisting objectives - and my browser answering them, often without me even knowing the questions.

That's a valid criticism, but not one that has a better solution than "just ignore people with telemetry turned off". Which I am afraid is the best way to deal with this so far.

"Don't use telemetry and use literally anything else" is the best way to deal with it, due to the nature of telemetry and the level of trust you are asking of your users (which is frankly insulting, given the nature of the news the past few years).

Please provide your sources for this highly questionable claim?

From where I'm standing, your comment is straight out of Kafka. You just apologetically ("I'm afraid") keep insisting that the hostility being experienced is "the best way to deal with this."

What is your source for the proposition that Firefox gains from removing RSS?

What is your source for the proposition that telemetry is superior to randomized user surveys?

Mozilla has already crippled Firefox's extension system, so why bother?

In a sense those users explicitly opt out from having their voices heard. Any other way to gather information on feature usage would most likely be massively more biased than direct telemetry.

In my anecdotal experience, this is a common problem: if your open-source project has an option for spying on users, the ones who pay attention to privacy and security opt out.

Debian's popcon survey has a worse version of this problem: it reports back the packages in use -- and nobody setting up a bunch of servers wants to leak that information, so they only get home users reporting in.

Out of interest (and this isn't a sarcastic question), how to you propose they should choose instead?

I think removing little used features is a good idea, else you slowly build up more and more things, and one thing I've learnt is that these little used features can end up upsetting more users who accidentally activate them, and are confused, than they have happy users.

Make it an extension API.

The GP noted that the more concerning thing going away isn't Firefox presentation of feeds (the live bookmarks) bit the discovery. So far, you can use the orange button to learn which page supports RSS or even learn that RSS exist in general. Without that button, even if there are extensions, only people who already know what RSS is will be motivated to install them.

Now we get that kind of default discoverability instead for proprietary services like Pocket...

A low-maintenance compromise would be to keep the button, but make it strictly extension-only. Provide an API/manifest entry where an extension can register as RSS reader. If the button is clicked, that extension gets a callback. If no extension is installed, open the Browse Extensions tab and offer an option to hide the button.

The Firefox devs would still need to maintain the button and feed discovery logic (which mostly checks for a specific meta tag, I think) but could still throw out live bookmarks, the Atom parser, etc.

The button went away by default ages ago though. Sure, you can manually add it to your menu bar, but who does that and doesn’t know about RSS already.

Fair point.

RSS is alive and doing very well. Just not in traditional readers.

It's nice that iTunes never grabbed the opportunity to lock in podcasts to their own system. They probably could've done it ten years ago. Instead we have their good solution of a few optional extensions to the mandatory RSS feed.

Oh they tried but bumbling incompetence and contractors saved the day. That and the bigger problem of iTunes being such a goatf*ck piece of software. It's like the contractors working on it were trying deliberately to make it bad.

You are allowed to say goatfuck on the internet. Nobody will punish you for it and I hazard to say the less self-censoring, the better.

I wouldn't call the "live bookmark" feature a "traditional reader" either. It is actually pretty unique, and doesn't scale very well.

I still use rss with a self-hosted tt-rss instance.

While i am sad to see Mozilla strip even more out of Firefox, live bookmarks was perhaps a real poor take on rss support.

First of all it didn't cache old entries.

second it didn't update unless the entry on the bookmarks was expanded.

third you didn't know what was read outside of a subtle icon change.

RSS more properly belongs in a email client like ui...

Precisely why I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader.

Only problem i have bumped into is easily sending a entry to the browser without reaching for the mouse.

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