First of all, 58 votes _is_ pretty meaningless. I could, with a blog post get 100 votes on any bug I wanted in a matter of hours.

Second, how about spending the same energy you did on this rant coming up with a better design for RSS features and submitting it to the browser vendors who accept feature requests?

Your post suggests over and over rss auto-discovery is being killed when it isnt. You no more today have to add an RSS button to your page than you did a year ago. The UI for RSS has actually improved with a menu item that makes it clear what RSS is "subscribe".

RSS never had a button in the toolbar. It had an icon in the addressbar. Now it has a full menu item in the bookmarks menu with a clear description of what it is "subscribe." something it lacked before and which makes it far more discoverable than the little orange chicklett in the addressbar.

Your rant is misplaced. Mozilla, with the creation of live bookmarks and the first high-profile placement of the rss icon has done more to promote RSS than any other piece of desktop software. The UI, as it was -- a tiny orange button in the addressbar wasn't helping users use the feature so it was removed. Better UI, a menu item with a real description of what RSS does, "subscribe" replaced it. That's a positive step, not a negative one. Though it may be encountered by fewer users, it will make much more sense to those who do encounter it.

Live bookmarks, the best RSS feature implementation I've seen to date in a web browser, is still there. Auto-discovery and a "subscribe" menu item is there. Mozilla has improved the design of RSS and you're ranting as if they've killed it.