For many years, I’ve been using the RSS button built into Firefox to copy and paste the feed link of a blog or website to my favorite RSS reader, Selfoss. That is until recently, however, when Mozilla decided to remove all RSS functionality, including the RSS button from the codebase. Shame on you Mozilla! Yes, compared to the billions of Facebook and Twitter users, those few (?) millions who use RSS seem to be nothing to you. Thanks for nothing! Frankly, I could not imagine to browse all the different sites I follow manually to check for new content without going utterly mad.
It was then I realized that I didn’t have an RSS icon and Feed link on this site, because I never really thought of it. After all, I didn’t need one because I had an RSS button in the browser. That was perhaps a bit thoughtless of mine as other browsers didn’t have an RSS button for quite some time as far as I can tell.
So here we go, I’ve added an RSS button and link on my blog now, see the status bar on the left or, on mobile devices, in the fold down menu when you click on the hamburger item. If you are not yet reading this blog and other sites via an RSS feed, think again, it is so much more convenient. And if you don’t want to run your own RSS aggregator at home, there are hosted alternatives such as Feedly and others to make life easier.
Hello Martin,
You are right. It’s so useful, I am reading your blog since 2009 and many others for years using RSS. What a pity that all these apps like Mail, Mozilla, and others are removing the RSS features.
Thank you a lot for all your articles.
I understand the advantages of a modular architecture vs. a monolithic one.
If only Mozilla would have just migrated the RSS Feed Reader stuff into a kind of “Officially supported” Addon.
Altough some people say RSS is dead, i don’t think it is. I had even seen major news outlets writing about RSS last year (during the “Oh shit, Facebook might not be a good idea”-Phase).
There are also a ton of Addons that deal with RSS.
This one seems to find a websites RSS feeds for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-to-rss
But as always, browser extensions need trust…
FWIW, I’ve installed “Want My RSS” to replace this important feature.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
It’s pretty minimal, but it discovers feeds, displays them and lets you subscribe to them using your favorite feed reader.