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Firefox 64 drops RSS support, thoughts?

Quentin Sonrel on December 13, 2018

Bonus question: do you (still) use RSS? For those of you who do, what client do you use?

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ondrejs profile image
Ondrej

Yes, Snownews (on HBSD). Would highly recommend it. I do not use Firefox though, Chrome/Chromium is much more secure.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Chrome/Chromium is much more secure

?

You can't drop a sentence like this without an explanation, my dear Watson 🧐

Do you mean because Chromium has a bigger community and therefore more eyes on the code? Or are you referring to something in particular?

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ondrejs profile image
Ondrej

Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox, formalized a release schedule for handling their development. It is based on fixed windows (6 weeks) where builds cascade down a series of different channels (Nightly, Aurora, etc.), each time with more bug fixes and stability. This is transparent and a perfectly acceptable way to manage a software project (Chrome has a similar series of channels, although they move much faster and not on a fixed schedule.)

Mozilla releases Nightly builds every day (basically)
Aurora builds are released every 6 weeks
Beta builds are bug fix releases of Aurora, every 6 weeks
Release builds are final bug fix releases of Beta, every 6 weeks
Extended Support Release builds are Release builds with all the Critical and High security bugs patched, about every 6 weeks. To be clear - only Critical and High security bugs.

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ondrejs profile image
Ondrej • Edited

Here are some minor quirks, but in comparison to Firefox ESR's bug-fix scenario no big deal.

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ondrejs profile image
Ondrej

Case of threat modelling:

Chain a series of Medium / Low vulnerabilities together until they get the level of access they require, e.g. remote code execution. They have a permanent window of exposure.

Is it enough? I think we've gone beyond boundaries of this topic too far.

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ondrejs profile image
Ondrej • Edited

Ah, I almost forgot this nice little 'feature'.

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tobiassn profile image
Tobias SN

I find it to be good, as I personally don’t use RSS, neither does the majority of people. Thus, Mozilla has reduced what to most is bloat, and won’t have to maintain it. Besides, there’s a dozen extensions out there that one could use instead.

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Daniel da Rocha

What does this mean for RSS and its users (who happen to use Firefox as their main browser)?

I use Feedly and Firefox every day. Never once I thought about Firefox as "providing RSS support", not even sure how would that affect me and my (heavy) RSS usage.

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ivolimmen profile image
Ivo Limmen

I use CommaFeed. With a 100+ feeds...

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rbyd3vyaox profile image
RBYD3vYaox

Not a huge problem for me.

I use Inoreader to subscribe and read news.

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belinde profile image
Franco Traversaro

Bummer, I really like RSS. I'm not using Firefox, but it's sad such a handy technology gets dismissed. I'm using Feedly (and Newsfold on Android) for everything, also dev.to.

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marissab profile image
Marissa B

Ditto on Feedly. It was my replacement for Google Reader when that was decommed.

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️

I get all my daily news through RSS feeds, viewed in Feedly. Best way to do it as far as I can see

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goebish profile image
Goebish

Yes I do, I use Thunderbird to read the feeds but I wonder how I'll be able to subscribe now that the RSS button has disappeared from Firefox.

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Erik Pischel