Firefox Removes RSS Support

Effective with Firefox 64, which is the current version as of December 28, 2018, the Firefox browser no longer supports RSS feed discovery or preview. Chrome killed that functionality a while ago. Less than .1% of users used the RSS functionality of Firefox so I guess I can't really blame the developers for killing support.

However, since Firefox is open source the community has already provided alternatives. There are a couple of Firefox extensions, however my preferred solution is this simple Javascript bookmarklet. All you have to do is create a new bookmark on your bookmark bar in Firefox, edit the bookmark, paste the code, and save. Then clicking that link on any page will show all the RSS feeds associated with the page, which you can then put into whatever feed reader tool you use.

I think RSS is one of the most under appreciated technologies spawned by the web. In a better world, we'd all be keeping in touch via open technologies like RSS, and not be trapped in walled gardens like Twitter and Facebook. There is a lot of interesting early stage work on open alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Mastodon as a Twitter alternative is probably the most mature, and the only one that I'm using regularly at the moment. However in 2019 I intend to explore this space further.

This is entry #28 in my attempt at 31 days of blogging for December 2018. I've haven't posted here daily since about 2007, so this should be interesting.