An inspirational post, that obviously leads to some overdue discussion.

I never gave the RSS integration in browsers much thought. Probably because I never used a browser as a primary RSS reader. And the reason for that might have been the poor usability of RSS in browsers. But there was never a concsious decision on my part. It just never occured to me or seemed like a practical solution.

It would actually make sense, since RSS feeds often reference to websites again. I daresay that I open through RSS ten times as many pages than through classic bookmarks (a very prominent browser functionality).

Since November I regularly used RockMelt as an additional browser. And one of my most used features is the feed bar on the right. I now have all my important (RSS) feed in it including twitter searches and all. There are even more recent feeds that I did not bother to update in my old RSS reader.

Excellent article. I totally agree that this development is unfortunate. I use Opera which I find has very good RSS support.

I think that RSS is not known much outside converts and techies because people often take for granted the idea that users all know what it is. In my experience, that is not always the case. I remember reading this post years ago: How to explain RSS the Oprah way backinskinnyjeans.com/… I used it to explain RSS to friends in simple terms.

RSS isn't going away because it's integrated into too many other delivery services. I'm thinking mostly about podcasts, but there are other things that go out that way too. Most content that can be viewed in other devices or apps comes that way so it's not really practical to get rid of the underlying RSS.

Actually I found your whole post a little confusing because I never use my browser as a feed reader. I'd be a little surprised if many people who follow more than a couple feeds do. Maybe it's partly the fault of the browser interfaces, but the main reason I'm not going to use Chrome or Firefox to manage my feeds is that I'm not tied to one computer or browser and I don't really want to be. I don't think most laypeope will ever have the need for the amount of content management that I regularly engage in so they will never have the same use for RSS feeds that I do. I don't think making the buttons in the browser different will change that.

Kroc - Thanks for sharing your feelings. I think Asa broke rule #1 ("don't be an arse") in his first reply. Kind of arrogant and rude from someone who claims to be a "community coordinator". Is that is the kind of chest-beating, brow-beating interaction I should expect from Mozilla if I write about Firefox in an unfavorable manner on my own blog?

I think the real title of this article should be, "Firefox is dying..." Mozilla did a lot of great innovating...5 years ago. Since then, Webkit has left them in the dust. If you want to continue experiencing the joys of RSS, I suggest trying Safari or the new RockMelt browser (based on Chrome).

The future of RSS is best kept in the realm of wenapps.

Use Google Reader or any other RSS aggregating app/service and you're done! No need to rely on the browser for it.,?

I love this C64 theme btw :)

I have heard people crying a lot about RSS dying. If all browser makers started hiding the rss symbol it might happen! But, for now it is safe. Yeah, it won't hit mainstream. But, it will continue to have users.

Btw, you didn't even mention Opera, which has an excellent RSS reader with all essential features like offline reading, folders and search.

What bugs me the most is that the Firefox developers use statistical data obtained through the Test Pilot extension to justify the removal of the RSS icon. I am one of the many people who participated in these studies and I know that I haven't clicked the RSS icon during the time this data was collected. At least in my case, this doesn't mean that I don't miss the icon big time.

I subscribe to new pages about once a month, and in most cases it was that neat little icon that remembered me that I could do that after visiting the same page several times for ten days in a row. On the pages I didn't want to subscribe to, the RSS icon didn't bother me at all, because it was just a cute little icon in the address bar. In the last weeks, I didn't subscribe to any new pages. Instead, I've fallen back to visiting the same pages over and over to see if they changed.

After reading this page today, I know why. It seems that I've noticed it too late and that the developers already made their decision and stopped discussing the issue... and I unwillingly played a small role with by submitting my Test Pilot data. That's really disappointing.

@Asa: I'm aware that the feature wasn't removed but moved to the Bookmarks menu and a separate toolbar button, but I don't feel that either of the two is an adequate replacement for the urlbar icon. The toolbar button takes up a lot of precious space while being grayed out most of the time - I highly doubt that many people are going to use it. And the Bookmarks menu is only an option for people who regularly use it, which users weren't really encouraged to do with the last versions of Firefox (bookmark star, awesomebar, no easy way to display ALL used tags through the bookmarks menu, no unsorted bookmarks in bookmarks menu for a long time...). I don't think that the benefit of it being a full menu item outweighs the loss of its prominent position. Also, the text used to describe the new menu item was accessible as a tooltip for the old urlbar icon. I can't see how this change could make it easier to understand the RSS feature.

3 Things,

1. These forums look horrific. I had to force myself ti bother to post on this article.

2. Mozilla have never listened to their tech users whether it be about the XML bugs, view source parsing etc. They think they know what people want and everyone else is wrong.

3. If removing the rss icon is based on statistics as per

"The reason for this is that statistically, only 3%–7% of users use the RSS button on the toolbar. "

Then they should be removing that EV crap for its low scores too... oh wait, no that's a revenue generator for them isn't it.

Firefox has turned into a big fat lazy giant panda and people are moving away from it. Indeed Firefox is the new Internet Explorer.

ScaredyCat: how are EV certificates a "revenue source" for Mozilla?

They are not in any way a 'revenue source' for Mozilla.

Just a precision: not all French people are smokers and also not all French people are rude.

When I started using RSS feeds about 8 years ago, I was in a pretty technical software dev area. Even then, many of my colleagues were unable to see the value of RSS. I recently tried to explain the benefits of RSS to some otherwise web-wise people and, again, saw a lot of blank faced looks. The average web user simply does not "get" RSS. Calling it "subscribe" may help, but, for many people, the idea of checking several websites for updates on a daily basis is not something they do, so RSS doesn't seem worth considering (even if they understand what it does).

On the Firefox topic, I agree with others on this. FF was once the browser of choice for many techie types. It is no longer. I've been a Chrome user for about 18 months. No new PCs in my area get FF installed (as they would once have). Chrome can't handle RSS, but as a browser it beats FF by far. I'm no Google fanboy and would like to continue to support FF, but it's just no good these days.

If you're comparing RSS to floppy disks, I think you've lost the war. Floppy disks died for a reason: they were replaced by stuff that was significantly better.

I love websites that aggregate content together (techmeme, hacker news). Far more valuable to me than RSS, which I haven't used in years.

Great post, I initially started to use RSS in both iGoogle and desktop software but quickly lost interest as the experience is somewhat archaic.

Being a web designer I often have to dumb down terminology for clients and their users, so understand the need for an 'even a monkey could use it' UX. Both Facebook and Twitter excel at making their UX appealing to all users without them having to think about it.

Surely to integrate some of the jQuery-esque goodness of these and other sites within the browser for a better user experience would be a welcomed and relatively painless inclusion?

Just imagine, a live, updating, content rich Delicious in your browser ...

"what regular user wouldn’t want this feature!? It would save them hours browsing every day!"

Regular users would hopefully not be browsing for hours every day in the first place.

RSS isn't going anywhere. People have been crying about the "death of RSS" for years, just like the "death of email" among others. It's sensationalist at best, shortsighted and just plain wrong at worst.

Ha. You aren't calling for the protection of RSS; you're calling for the protection of user privacy through browser simplicity. I, like many of my less-than-obsessed brethren on the internet, use Google Reader to track my RSS feeds. It's simple, it works, and it there isn't a pressing need to change the system.

Or, in the alternative, I can have my favorite blogrolls e-mailed to me daily through their various subscription services. Perfectly safe? No. But simple, effective, convenient, and wholly sufficient.

What you are complaining about is as far removed from the "Death of RSS" as one could possibly be following its invention. The demand for technology that will automatically present users with routine updates from interesting content-producers will not go away, and RSS will only die when a competitor technology replaces it.

re: GoogleReader: kinda beats the whole point, doesn't it. Might as well "use facebook for everything"... as it's the same thing, with a different set of databases.

re: Browsers: Personally I don't think anyone who isn't using Opera has the right to complain about *anything* haha :P Chrome: It lost me at "start the install just by clicking a link, not give you an option where to install, and phone home 24/7 by default".

re: RSS: SimplePie hasn't even been updated for PHP5. I don't know about other languages, but with PHP it's a nightmare to parse RSS. Maybe I haven't found the right library yet? There seems to be not a single currently maintained RSS parser for PHP... So in the big scheme of things, Firefox moving the symbol or Chrome not supporting RSS, just doesn't matter to me.

Before RSS can be integrated "end to end", there really first has to be ONE solid spec and at least ONE implementation that actually works. We have "RSS 0.92", "RSS 2.0", and "Atom 0.3" and have had that for how long? Seems like a bunch of people had a bunch of (mediocre) ideas in the beginning of the century, and that's that now. Or did I miss something?

If you ask me, it should be reinvented using JSON, for starters. And be made truly minimal... why for example do items in the feed *have* to have an author, or a title, or a pubdate? That and other stuff seems slightly broken to me... it has a long way to go, and it's not moving at all, it seems. And I really, really want it to.

Hmm, it seems I was slightly out of date with my rant, it's "RSS 1.0", "RSS 2.0" and "ATOM 1.0" now actually, sorry. And I guess it shouldn't be that hard to create my own feed parser using the XML parser of PHP... but still... I think really RSS isn't as lightweight as it could/should be. *pouts* ^^

I just want to point out that I am reading your blog via an RSS feed and I am using Chrome. Google fully supports RSS with Google Reader.

Maybe I'm missing something... I use Firefox, but I never liked the way the RSS button worked, so I use the NewsFox plug-in. Just because Mozilla is doing away with the RSS button doesn't mean it's giving up on RSS, does it? Isn't it just as likely that the plug-ins are doing a better job?

Reading the RSS "article" I had the feeling that I am already in the Idiocracy world.
RSS (and its symbol) are for Internet literate people, and we cannot expect all Internet users to know and use RSS.
Further more, every intelligently developed Internet site and weblog has the RSS button on its first page.

Do you (the owner of this forum) imagine how many Internet users can menage to comment in your "fancy" forum.
Shall we write a guide for them and teach them how to say to you, how stupid they think you are? You can be sure that you look very stupid to Internet illiterate people (and not only to them)

I hope I didn't brake the first rule - not be bigger arse than you ;)
The second rule depends on how BIG arse you are.

Excellent piece, at least it make us think about..

Since I discover RSS, I loved the idea of syndication, as almost everyone here agree.

And I really think this is happening right now, its not a "could happen". Since the FaceBook&Twitter boom in the web, it looks like every big site is missing RSS. Or at least they are not promoting it.

There are other uses of RSS, that are not related to UI, like the "server side aggregation".

What I would like to see is a good evolution of the "pseudo-standard" and more generalized use of RSS in other areas (like Business Applications) and not only in Web Friki debates...

PS: Great idea, to show the new comments every time I re-visit the page

You might be interested in the design work that I did for Mozilla in the fall of 2009. I worked hard to improve the UI for subscribing to content — namely by using the verb "follow", and making it available for all sorts of entities:

factoryjoe.com/…

factoryjoe.com/…

Curious what Asa thinks of this alternative design.