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RE: RSS article

Eric

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.

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