"Further more, every intelligently developed Internet site and weblog has the RSS button on its first page."

Oh really? I for one don't see a point for it, because every page with subpages, every folder, every link category has RSS feeds, some pages even have more than one - and I am not going to clutter up the page with stuff there is a header link for, which works just fine. Seems more intelligent to me, too. Not to mention more lightweight and flexible.

"Do you (the owner of this forum) imagine how many Internet users can menage to comment in your "fancy" forum."

How about "everybody who can read and has the slightest bit of curiosity".. ? That would be my guess at least. If you can use google or wikipedia how could you possibly not be able to use this forum?

I mean, unless it makes your eyes bleed of course, which I would agree is kinda likely :P It sure could do with a different default stylesheet, and user preferences so everybody can change it to their taste. But otherwise? Come on..

"Shall we write a guide for them and teach them how to say to you, how stupid they think you are?"

Now that's random. So far you're the only one implying people are "too stupid" to use this forum, so why don't you write that guide? ^^

Do you realize that you don't have an easy RSS button on your blog?

But it's right there on line 6 of the page source:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/rss" title="All categories" />

Which means for example Opera shows the icon in the address bar. Firefox shows "subscribe to this site". Etc.

Do you realize that having an extra button for RSS is basically obsolete, and should actually be deprecated?

Hi, I have 2 computers and I don't want to read stuff that I have read on the other computer.

So I use web based RSS readers. First with Bloglines and now with Google Reader. I can't see how it can get better than this.

regards
Alfred
alfredivy.per.sg/…

Every should post a get well message!!

Kroc is sick & obviously out of his mind :)

RSS is so alive & well.

Publishers and websites keep it alive, period.

Stopping RSS is almost like stopping illegal file sharing!

What really pains Kroc is "in browser" auto-discovery for his own site.

He posts links to the source code, his email and countless other really important links; but chooses not to share his somewhat vital RSS a link in a page.

In some sad twisted way auto-discovery in keeping with his own laziness prevents him from attempting to fix the problem on his site. In the same way he refuses to fix the ugliness of this awful forum.

Kroc, you brought up floppy disks (a reference now removed it seems), I'm just pointing out why they died.

"If RSS dies we lose the ability for one website we read to not know what other websites we read"

This is simply overheated rhetoric. It means no such thing. Even if Mozilla removed bookmarks from their browse, it still wouldn't stop you from memorizing or writing down every single favorite website you enjoy reading and visiting them on a daily basis. As it stands, you can bookmark them, making it even easier. I've never found reading RSS feed content to be particularly enjoyable...I much prefer reading web content on the web. I also enjoy Instapaper, but I realize you think that's an infringement on your privacy.

(oh and yeah, I have a horrible case of the flu too man...I went to the ER a few days ago and am still feeling awful. get better soon!)

Personally, the article is full of it along with a majority of the comments here. The article & comments sound more like an outburst towards Firefox than RSS. RSS is definitely not dead. It is just being used differently than what it was in the early days. RSS was not specifically designed for just a web-browser therefore its not the sole browsers responsibility. It was designed to be web-based or desktop-based. With just about every site now containing a Subscribe button there is no need for a button in the URL bar anymore. What can be done for the slim chance a site does not have a subscribe button is the browser displaying a RSS button. Bottom line it is the responsibility of the site owner to make aware of RSS and its use or at min a link to the info.

I agree with Not2Concerned.

Chrome doesn't have built in support for RSS, but it does have applications, one of which is Google Reader(an RSS application). If you as a web developer want people to follow your RSS feed, get up with the times and post a link on your website. If you only want the techies to see it, then leave it where it is. You could stop complaining and write extensions for chrome and firefox 4 that allow you to subscribe to rss url's scraped from the HEAD.

A simple search in the chrome web store finds that Google has already done it for chrome.

Browsers have always been HORRIBLE rss readers, and I'd prefer less bloat and more speed at the expense of a built in rss reader.

You're uninformed. Sorry.

~"RSS was not specifically designed for just a web-browser therefore its not the sole browsers responsibility. It was designed to be web-based or desktop-based."~

Yeah, but the "web-based" part of it IS the web-browsers responsibility... the desktop-based part isn't relevant here, so why even bring it up? Pad much?

~"With just about every site now containing a Subscribe button there is no need for a button in the URL bar anymore."~

Heh, I see what you did there... but no, it's exactly the other way around: with a well-specified way to include links to RSS feeds in the header part of the HTML, there is no need to display RSS buttons anymore.

~"What can be done for the slim chance a site does not have a subscribe button is the browser displaying a RSS button."~

But since the browser can't know if there is a subscribe link in the HTML body of the page or not, it needs to parse the HTML header links anyway... which is why browsers, including Firefox, do just that.

Those RSS buttons in the HTML body are plain obsolete I guess, like FONT tags and all that crud we gleefully get rid of once we came up with something much better.

~"Bottom line it is the responsibility of the site owner to make aware of RSS and its use or at min a link to the info."~

Sure, if you *really* want people to use your RSS feeds, you can't rely on the browsers or RSS being common knowledge.. yet. It would be nice if browsers helped out there, though, and the fact that only 5% of the Windows users use the RSS button in the address bar if Firefox actually means they should make it BIGGER, they should make it BLINK. Or mention it in a "first-time startup tutorial, etc.".

Imagine an author who doesn't write about what's in his heart and mind, what he believes to be correct or important - but instead about "what the people want" (which by definition is what the people already know): that author guy may be successful or not, but one thing is sure, that's one shitty author. Whoredom catering to boredom, the disease of the internet or the modern world even. (now how's /that/ for being full of it or having a go haha? you're welcome ^^ I wish it wasn't true, you know)

"less bloat and more speed at the expense of a built in rss reader."

Opera displays feeds just fine, and offers links to subscribe to them via various web services. No, I don't use my browser "as a feed reader" either, but it surely isn't asking much for a browser to be able to display a feed.

"More speed" by using plugins? First off, Opera again: More features, less size, more speed, super fast installer that actually respects you. So no, not having a feed reader doesn't mean the program is faster. Programming skillfully does. And hey, now Opera even has Extensions *on top* of all that slickness. THIS is how you do it, not provide an API so others can do the work for you. (just check our Opera's Dragonfly and then realize how many Firefox plugins that one piece of genius saves you, haha!)

Second, if you implement the functionality via a plugin instead of natively, how is that faster? Oh right, you're comparing a hypothetical browser with a native feature with a hypothetical browser without that feature AND without an installed extension for it... and then you call others misinformed. Huh ^^

I use all browsers (with the exceotion of Internet Explored) because I don't like any of them. For years Firefox has been my default browser because of its support for add-ons, its bookmarks management and, since I discovered RSS, because of the RSS icon in the url bar which (contrary to Kroc's opinion mentioned above- I prefer icons to text, the RSS icon is visually more appealing than 'Subscribe' for example) notifies me that a site provides RSS support so I do not need external tools like FeedBurner to add feeds to my Feed Reader, simple and easy (I do not think that a browser should try to educate people about RSS or anything else, when I saw RSS buttons at websites I got curious, checked at Wikipedia and since then I cannot imagine reading articles without the help of my aggregator). Unfortunately, in Firefox 4 (which for me is a spectacular failure) the developers removed the RSS icon which is ridiculous, and which was one of the reasons for me to keepto an older version. If a feature is not used by the majority of users it does not mean that it should be removed, in this stream of crippled logic at least 90% of the features that an office suite offers should have already been removed because 90% of the users do not use more than 10% of these features. The Firefox developers as usual did not pay any attention to users' complains and removed the icon entirely leaving no option to restore it, which would have been the lesser evil. Yes, as one could have expected, very soon plug-ins that offer restoration of the RSS icon to the url bar appeared. I don't like to clutter my browser with plug-ins, I use only few, indispensable for me for fluent and easy web browsing, so I prefer swtichning to Opera than searching for add-ons only to restore a feature that has been removed. I am not going to discuss here the downfall of Firefox in version 4, enough has been said about its shortcomings, for me the worst about it is not its slowness, it instability, its high resource usage, its terrible fonts rendering, is not any of its many major defects, but the direction of its development. Mozilla programmers decided to entirely copycat Google Chrome, maybe because of its fast market share growth. This is amazingly stupid, people who like Chrome won't switch to Firefox because the latter resembles Chrome, people who preferred Firefox and were disgusted by Chrome would find no reason to stick to it. If I want Chrome I will have Chrome, but not something that imitates it and is 10 times slower (Firefox 4 needs more time to initiate than OpenOffice for example, amazing). So Firefox developers showed once again that they do not care for the 'elite' users who rely on RSS feeds and they sumply force them to switch to another, more friendly browser- Opera, Safari, even K-Meleon (which is the fastest and lightest browser, although Gecko-based).

I had a look at Asa Dotzler's blog and now I understand better why what happened to Firefox really happened- it looks more like an advertising site than a developer's blog, narcissistic comments about FF, attacks on other browsers, arrogant attitude towards those ignorami who dared disagree with him. As usual, marketing killed programming.