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Comment by avivo | Hacker News Reader

Can someone actually explain to me why Mozilla stopped building in an RSS reader into Firefox?

If it also can subscribe to substacks, it's like a Pocket that actually gets updates. Heck, they can just build it on Pocket!

It seems like that could be incredibly valuable for the open web — and a free tool for conveniently reading newsletters built into Firefox might even increase market share? Looks like they removed it in 2018...but I never heard of people switching to Firefox from Google Reader, so I assume it was never very good, or poorly advertised?

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It took me years to find this, but here’s a summary:

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/25/mozilla-plans-to-remove-rs...

In short, updating the feature to competitive UX and security expectations wouldn’t have been worth the effort based on the usage numbers.

It's frustrating how Mozilla will use usage statistics as justification to kill a feature, whilst at the same time using nagging UI prompts to promote underperforming corporate decisions like Pocket and FFSync.

Perhaps they should have a rule that any feature proposed for deletion should be promoted equally aggressively for six months. If usage still doesn't increase then remove it.

True, I think third-party RSS readers are always going to be better though. Integration with specific partners and vendors makes RSS accessible. Mozilla would have developed something great, but it would have been tied to Mozilla products and services..

They should learn from Brave and replace the RSS native ads with their own.

> Integration with specific partners and vendors makes RSS accessible.

wat

Browser sync is a fairly crucial feature for many users who have multiple devices, or even just dual-boot. Or who want a backup of their bookmarks and history.

I don't care about a competitive UX for the in browser support. Just something that vagually renders the XML as something readable with a button to add to reader of choice. Even just leaving the old address bar icon indicating there is a feed available would be nice.

Firefox itself never had a real rss-reader. It had rss-parser which was incorperated into the bookmark-ui, making it barely useful for the purpose if consuming feeds. 3rd-party feedreader coming as addons were more useful than this and they were not really good either. So it's no surprise this feature had low usage and was thus removed.

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