Firefox has announced that they are going to discontinue support for RSS and Atom Feeds sometime between October and December 2018. “After careful consideration of various options (which also included doing nothing, or investing heavily in updating the code), we’ve decided to go ahead and remove builtin feed support from Firefox,” said Gijs Kruitbosch, an engineer on the Firefox browser.
Firefox also stated in a draft announcement that the RSS and Atom features had an outsized maintenance and security impact relative to their usage. Making these features as well-tested, modern and secure as the rest of Firefox would have cost significant time and effort, and the usage of these features doesn’t justify such an investment.
It seems as though Mozilla noticed that the vast majority of their users were not reading websites and articles in RSS mode on their PC and other mobile devices, so they just elected to discontinue it, rather than reprogram the engine and make it more secure. This is a severe blow to readers who simply want to read text, instead of a bloated website.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
