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Comment by smusamashah | Hacker News Reader

I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, all other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) had native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS as XML garbage e.g. open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml

Chrome came, all other browsers lost, then finally Google killed Google Reader and we had nowhere to go. That's how I believe it happened.

What's still worse is that Chrome DOES NOT SUPPORT RSS natively.

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I absolutely despise Chrome. It nags me into Google's ecosystem and it just feels wrong to use a window to the internet owned and controlled by the biggest bully on the internet - Google.

Chrome is the reason for many failures of the web experience. Support Firefox, it is equally as good IMO.

I'd like us to not see a day where we get "Only supported on Chrome" warnings.

> I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, all other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) had native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS as XML garbage e.g. open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml

I tried opening this link in Chrome and Firefox, and it looks exactly the same in both.

They do both look bad now (raw XML). However at least in Firefox, there used to be some basic styling.

Remember the little blurb in the header about how "this RSS feed doesn't provide its own styling so we've added our own"?

It seems to have gone away now too.

Chrome doesn't care because either Google doesn't care, or because Google is actively hostile to open web technologies.

Google killed their very nice (at the time) RSS product, Google Reader, so they could push people to Google+, their solution to compete with Facebook.

I can see the rationale behind Google's (mis)judgment. Social media was steamrolling RSS in popular adoption, and seemed like the future. Sometimes, new technology does replace old technology. But there were a lot of issues with planning and execution.

>> But there were a lot of issues with planning and execution.

That's a very generous understatement:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-pri...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing-jerkface/

https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history

I'm not sure if Chrome is exclusively to blame. I used to have an RSS feed button on my Firefox toolbar for news sites, and it was cleaner than having to go to the site itself for updates. This would be around 2007 or so.

I stopped using RSS altogether because at some point, every RSS button I clicked started taking me to a page with XML markup. Previously, clicking the button would add the site to my feed. I didn't understand how RSS worked, so over time I just stopped clicking the button.

> open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml

Chrome just displays xml. Edge does the same. And Firefox, displays it as if it was mangled html, so no xml tags are shown.

It's too bad too. Firefox used to support RSS till recently I believe. I wonder if Pocket had anything to do with it.

Is Mozilla still even a non-profit at this point?

I never thought that I would say this, but Mozilla's failure to evolve empowering user-centric clients from the great initial success of firefox and thunderbird is beginning to look suspect.

Increasingly they look like a tired alibi for a dystopic status-quo

A non-profit that gets the lion's share of its contributions from Google.

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