News feeds (RSS/Atom) are a fabulous technology. They’re not dead but this is the most recent cut in the killing of the Open Web with “death by a thousand cuts”¹.
After the killing of Google Reader, the really big blow was when Mozilla (the closest we have to a “champion for the open web”) removed the built-in feed preview feature and subscription UI from Firefox 64²³. While this wasn’t a major problem for users like me who can install an add-on, it meant that the discoverability of news feeds was no longer there.
This followed the trend over the past decade for web publishers to hide or not make it obvious that news feeds are available, e.g., many WordPress blogs automatically make news feeds available but unless the reader knows (from experience) about news feeds, there’s no obvious way to discover that they’re available.
All these changes will mean that new users of the Web will never know that news feeds exist – other than the restricted feeds provided by the walled gardens of large corporations – and the number of news feed users will continue to shrink.
Twenty years ago, when Microsoft were the large corporation trying to kill open web protocols and protocols (and Google weren’t evil), influential web developers and designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman banded together to create the Web Standards Project⁴⁵ to promote the openness and accessibility of the Web. They were largely successful in this goal (and closed shop in 2010) but without the existence of some organisation that keeps up this sort of advocacy, it will be the large corporations who control the direction and pace of change of the Web. This will be in the interests of their own profits – not the users.
More seriously, i agree with most of your post but the removal of feed support in Firefox is imo no worse than the removal of ftp or gopher support. These things don't belong in a modern browser, were mostly unused, can be moved to a separate client, and the Firefox support sucked in the first place... The actual users were already using separate clients.
After the killing of Google Reader, the really big blow was when Mozilla (the closest we have to a “champion for the open web”) removed the built-in feed preview feature and subscription UI from Firefox 64²³. While this wasn’t a major problem for users like me who can install an add-on, it meant that the discoverability of news feeds was no longer there.
This followed the trend over the past decade for web publishers to hide or not make it obvious that news feeds are available, e.g., many WordPress blogs automatically make news feeds available but unless the reader knows (from experience) about news feeds, there’s no obvious way to discover that they’re available.
All these changes will mean that new users of the Web will never know that news feeds exist – other than the restricted feeds provided by the walled gardens of large corporations – and the number of news feed users will continue to shrink.
Twenty years ago, when Microsoft were the large corporation trying to kill open web protocols and protocols (and Google weren’t evil), influential web developers and designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman banded together to create the Web Standards Project⁴⁵ to promote the openness and accessibility of the Web. They were largely successful in this goal (and closed shop in 2010) but without the existence of some organisation that keeps up this sort of advocacy, it will be the large corporations who control the direction and pace of change of the Web. This will be in the interests of their own profits – not the users.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi
2. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/
3. https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... feeds/
4. https://www.webstandards.org/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project