The 3-year old "Implement RSS natively in Chrome" bug just changed to "WontFix"

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=33181

by simonsarris • 13 years ago

203 140 13 years ago

code.google.com

I just wish Google would have been straight-up about this, had a big blog post saying "Here is why we think RSS needs to be replaced, and we've got some big plans to replace it, which involve a, b, c, and existing standard d. It's a bit abrupt but we're coming out with X on timeline Y."

Not this cryptic bullshit. It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.

philwelch3• 13 years ago

I think that "blog post" was called Google+.

mdwrigh25• 13 years ago

This has nothing to do with thinking RSS is dead or needs to be replaced, or whatever. It's just closing a feature request that was never going to be implemented. It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways.

pdx• 13 years ago

Really? Strange timing then, don't you think?

duskwuff2• 13 years ago

And it doesn't preclude the implementation of Chrome extensions which provide that functionality. It's merely a statement that it won't be integrated into the browser.

(Which is fine by me. Chrome doesn't need to try to be everything to everybody. For that, there's the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite.)

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

Why not? A web browser's goal is to display web content, and RSS is web content.

david_shaw• 13 years ago

> It never really made sense for the web browser itself to also be an RSS reader anyways.

Well, I can understand that it might not have been for everyone, but it was super convenient to be able to read RSS "folders" in Firefox. I'm a Chrome/Chromium fanboy these days--I use it on all of my devices--but I still miss that feature. If you don't want to use a certain functionality, it's easy to just avoid it; you can't ever use something that isn't implemented, though.

Clicking on a bookmark and seeing the most recent BBC headlines, for example, was awesome.

Yver• 13 years ago

Most of the feeds I read are HTML excerpts with a link to the full article, or notifications with a link to a page. It makes perfect sense to read them within a browser, as I do in Opera.

n09n• 13 years ago

Not at all. Opera has a built-in RSS reader and it's very useful.

Shorel• 13 years ago

Opera has an RSS reader, and in the future it will be one based on webKit.

acdha4• 13 years ago

That wake up call was when they strangled the Reader social community and started pushing Google+ so heavily on Gmail users: this social network wasn't going to be the kind of service you joined because you wanted to, it would be the sort which is even more hassle to ignore than to use.

batgaijin• 13 years ago

Dude don't play stupid. They don't want people to separate content from form (which would you classify ads as?) which at end of the day means cutting out rss except for twitteressque tidbit links.

SquareWheel• 13 years ago

You can certainly monetize via RSS ("click through to view the full story"). The is a push towards Google+ and reclaiming resources spent on Google Reader, nothing more.

DannoHung2• 13 years ago

What makes you think Google has any intention of replacing RSS? They're the new Microsoft.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

streptomycin5• 13 years ago

At least in the case of RSS, seems it was more like,

Embrace, unembrace.

andymoe• 13 years ago

Yeah, they did this whole RSS needs replaced thing already and they called it Atom... I think syndication and walled gardens don't mix very well. EDIT: Not that that is what's actually going on here. I don't even know why I'm commenting on this kind of frenzy creating garbage anyway :(

fakeer• 13 years ago

>>It's like breaking up with someone by just never returning their calls.

Can't say it's so in this case, but trust me it's the best way to be in some cases :-)

zobzu3• 13 years ago

They don't have plans to replace it, they just want to kill it. So, they don't have much to say, except "use google+" "use google news","forget rss"

philwelch3• 13 years ago

The old Google would champion RSS as an open alternative to proprietary social networks. Now they're trying to kill it.

eurleif• 13 years ago

Or the "old Google" was just the first phase of embrace/extend/extinguish, and you didn't realize.

shortsightedsid• 13 years ago

Do no evil as long as Wall Street is happy - seems to be their real motto.

Kerrick• 13 years ago

"Do no evil" is not the same as "Do every possible good thing forever."

zobzu3• 13 years ago

Do no evil to share holders.

Oh, you mean, like everybody. Ok!

ruswick3• 13 years ago

Are you certain that they are specifically trying to eliminate it? It seems as though they are merely abandoning it within their product line and within the company as a whole.

Accusations of an attempt to extinguish the RSS format probably can't be considered until they kill Feedburner, which constitutes a massive portion of the web and all RSS trafic.

carlcory• 13 years ago

The 1600+ people watching that bug, and the millions using reader are the minority. RSS is for hackers, and Google doesn't want to invest in those people. (Us)

acdha4• 13 years ago

That's like saying HTML is for hackers: ordinary users shouldn't need to look at the raw serialization format if the service is any good. The many not hackers I interacted with on the old reader appreciated the way they could keep track of interesting things even if they were only shallowly aware of how it worked.

ruswick3• 13 years ago

Do you mean "the old Reader" or The Old Reader (http://theoldreader.com/)?

sp3322• 13 years ago

RSS isn't for hackers, it's for infovores. The same people who make the majority of pageviews on the internet, oh and also make most of the pages on the web. It's for a minority, but that minority is the very tip-top of the most hardcore users of the web. It's not going away.

zanny2• 13 years ago

It is worth mentioning a large part of the reason RSS is so reclusive is that none of the browsers kept the "subscribe via RSS" button in the nav bar Firefox had 6 years ago. Back then it was one click to add feeds to the browser, and anyone could use it. Now you have to go out of your way looking for it.

kmfrk6• 13 years ago

I'd say that the movement from print news to digital news and per-author and per-article consumption and the resulting "curation" craze means RSS is more relevant now, not less.

It's just that companies like Facebook and Google are trying to lock in users on their own platforms.

Makes you wonder what is ahead for Blogger. It will probably be assimilated eventually.

slig• 13 years ago

Exactly. Here on HN we can see people complaining about Chrome being bloated, slow and that they're considering moving back to Firefox as result.

Since only a minority of Chrome users are RSS users, it makes sense to have it as an extension. They're not stopping anyone from building one. So, hack away.

dinkumthinkum4• 13 years ago

I love Firefox but I have hard time seeing in what universe Chrome is more bloated or slower than Firefox. Firefox is about on par with IE for start up speed at this point, I believe.

Maxious• 13 years ago

Turning off any further comments on that bug is cute.

itafroma• 13 years ago

That's been standard procedure for issues getting a lot of off-topic comments, or have the potential for the same, for some time, and it's definitely welcome when trying to track the status of popular features/bugs. The point of issue comments is to contribute to getting an issue fixed or resolved, not to act as a discussion thread. It's quite clear this was a done deal for some time and there's nothing further to discuss in that issue.

duskwuff2• 13 years ago

Especially given that every comment gets emailed to everyone who'd starred the bug. Leaving comments open (and receiving "BUT WHYYYY" comments) just annoys the hell out of everyone who'd starred it.

Evbn2• 13 years ago

Once a decision is made, further discussion is waste of everyone's energy. If the decision weren't final, the bug would remain open. People can post angree screeds elsewhere, like on their blogs' RSS feeds.

lrei2• 13 years ago

I guess this makes it clear where Google stands on RSS.

I think it's sad. RSS is a lot more open than the alternative: Twitter.

Google seems to think that the result of an end to RSS will be good for them. Unless they are planning on buying twitter, I doubt it will be.

Evbn2• 13 years ago

Why do people keep mentioning Twitter? It's not even vaguely related to what RSS does, any more than, say, a digital radio station you could tune iTunes to.

splawn3• 13 years ago

When you boil it down Twitter, Facebook, and G+ do the exact same thing as RSS,but they are all just easier,less flexible, closed and more centralized. You publish something and your subscribers receive it....seems at least vaguely related to me, imo.

lrei2• 13 years ago

Because if you can't subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds to follow the news and click on what interests you, the two options you're left with are either remembering to open a bunch of different sites a bunch of times a day to check the news or looking at your twitter stream. Most people I know have opted for the latter. In an RSS free world, I would too. Perhaps with the exception of opening HN (which I already do) and maybe reddit a few times a day.

nthj• 13 years ago

Well, I haven't used RSS in years. I just follow bloggers & websites' on twitter. My twitter feed spits out all the news articles into a passive stream of noise without interrupting me (like an email would do), so it's pretty similar to RSS for me.

ruswick3• 13 years ago

Insofar as a lot of sites publish their entire feed to Twitter, composing a huge list of publications could replicate Reader to an extent.

I've considered doing it as a stopgap, but it's just too laborious for sets of feeds numbering over 100, and will be inconsistent because some feeds will undoubtedly lack Twitter accounts.

AaronFriel• 13 years ago

I'm starring the issue because I'm a slacktivist.

I'm also going to become less reliant on Google services because when they decide other open standards are less profitable than getting more eyeballs Google+ I don't want to be stuck like I am now.

martindale2• 13 years ago

I too have starred this issue.

hrayr• 13 years ago

I honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. Chrome browser will not support RSS natively, seems like they never had the intention to do so to begin with. Why are we up in arms about a product not supporting some specific feature? Why are we equating that with some evil plot?

  ...there have never been any plans to implement this natively in Chrome.  
  I don't know why this bug has been left open for years, making it look as 
  if we're considering this, when we're not.  It just gets people's hopes 
  up, and then makes them bitter when years go by with no action.

This about sums it up for me, and it's completely understandable.

humanspecies3• 13 years ago

The fuss is about Google embracing/extending and then suffocating every WWW technology they can't shove at least 20 ads into.

nickpresta• 13 years ago

Such as?

minwcnt52• 13 years ago

Had Google actually even "embraced" RSS? I would say no. Reader isn't one of their core products and never was.

kmfrk6• 13 years ago

This makes me even more reluctant to switch to Chrome from Opera.

I hope Opera continue to evolve their platform, WebKit engine or not. :/

zanny2• 13 years ago

Dissatisfied with webkit? Why not gecko(firefox)? =P

kmfrk6• 13 years ago

The engine switch doesn't bother me. It's just that Opera as a company is currently in flux, and they are discontinuing work in their Dragonfly web inspector, for instance, which does not at all suggest a good future ahead of Opera.

Firefox is pretty much the polar opposite of Opera in terms of features, although I like their work on open standards like Opera's.

rafski• 13 years ago

RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.

They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.

ChrisClark• 13 years ago

I see plenty of ads in my feeds. And nothing to stop Google from placing ads in Reader itself.

kmfrk6• 13 years ago

They still own FeedBurner, too, (until they shut it down).

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

Most of the ad supported feeds I'm subscribed to have one ad post per week. Most ad supported websites have many ads per article. Guess which medium makes Google more money?

ok_craig3• 13 years ago

And hasn't RSS use been declining anyway? Not much of a threat.

zmmmmm• 13 years ago

> RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads

Virtually no content site puts its entire article into the RSS feed. They want to monetize with ads even more than Google wants them to. If RSS was a threat to anything it would be social news services like G+ which depend on a non-federated model to maintain their walled gardens.

jackmoore• 13 years ago

There is no conspiracy here. That feature wasn't going to be brought back to Chrome, and should have been closed a long time ago. Shutting down Reader shined a light on this issue, so if they hadn't closed it before now is a logical time to close it.

Cutting off comments make sense as well as there isn't going to be constructive discussion at this point. Constructive discussion has already been had and a decision was reached. Having comments open at this point just inviting people to grind their axes.

curcumin• 13 years ago

Yep, Goog wants you to read news, find out about the world only through its walled-pages, read the penultimate paragraph of this naive article sums it up! http://gigaom.com/2013/03/16/why-google-killed-off-google-re...

humanspecies3• 13 years ago

I can't believe we're going to see idiots actually wear google's spyware on their faces in a few months from now.

Kiro• 13 years ago

I'm one of those "idiots". You're welcome to say it to my face.

humanspecies3• 13 years ago

IF YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR IT YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

IF YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR IT YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.

But Google is different. I swear. They don't even care about Wall Street. They said so.

streptomycin5• 13 years ago

A company gets X in revenue from a product. Whether that X comes from ad revenue or subscription fees seems immaterial. Either way, Google Reader would have been a rounding error in the grand scheme of things at Google.

icebraining4• 13 years ago

You don't pay for Hacker News.

lmm• 13 years ago

The HN readership is one of many things PG sells to companies in return for equity in them. This should have always been clear.

kevinpet• 13 years ago

That's a pretty whiny feature request. I read the first few dozen comments, and I don't really know what exactly was being requested.

It's clear to me that the right approach is an extension specific to your preferred RSS reader. I understand that some browsers have an RSS reader built it, but that still doesn't make it a core feature that's going to be used by a big portion of their users.

ernesth• 13 years ago

This feature request asks for two things to be native in chromium:

1. have an indicator in the browser interface that an rss feed is available for the current page.

2. have a preview of rss feeds rather than unstyled xml. It is just a matter of adding style for some xml files the way shiira[1] first did or the way safari[2], opera[3] or firefox do.

It is clear to me that the second is nice for the user even if the chromium developpers do not intend to implement a full rss reader as it just consists in making some common web documents readable directly in the browser, it is far more logical for a web browser to display rss than to display pdf... The first point is said to distract the user and clutter the interface so I can understand why it should be an extension (firefox voluntarily suppressed this indicator a few years ago).

[1] http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/reviews/large/shi... [2]: http://media.arstechnica.com/images/tiger/safari-rss-big.jpg [3]: http://www.problogdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/wind...

tytso• 13 years ago

I actually read RSS feeds --- using the Currents application (which is supported by Google and under active development; it's getting updates) on my Android Nexus 10 tablet.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and....

So for those people who claim that Google doesn't care at all about RSS, Currents is certainly a counter-example.

And by the way, Google is a big enough company that to claim that a corporation as a whole as an opinion about any subject or any protocol is a little silly. Take for example, "IBM Loves Lotus Notes; therefore IBM must hate SMTP." Absurd. There is a part of IBM that make a lot of money off of Lotus Notes, yes. There are also lots of IBM engineers and former IBM engineers who hated it with a hot blazing passion. I'm aware of one IBM division which supplied its engineers with a Lotus Notes-free e-mail address because it was necessary for them to do their jobs. Specifically, interact with the open source community with a mail product that wouldn't destroy whitespace in patches....

kmfrk6• 13 years ago

Maybe Larry Page should write a public statement entitled "Thoughts on RSS".

Samuel_Michon3• 13 years ago

Interesting connection you made there. Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" was about moving away from proprietary tech towards open web standards. What Google is doing with RSS is the complete opposite.

dinkumthinkum4• 13 years ago

I could be wrong but I'm not sure people would like the answer. If the reasoning is that Larry Page should write a statement to appease the tech intelligentsia; I'm afraid their actual motivations would be probably be more uncomfortable than the current situation. In other words, I don't think it is necessarily a long term statement about the technical viability of RSS (probably something more to do with protecting advertising revenue, but I don't know).

miles• 13 years ago

"For a better user experience, we have migrated your feeds to a custom Google+ profile. We hope you will enjoy connecting with friends, family, and advertisers while reading news brought to you by Cuke(R)!"

ihuman2• 13 years ago

Does anyone know who pkasting@chromium.org is?

dangrossman• 13 years ago

Peter Kasting is the founding member of the Chrome team at Google.

ihuman2• 13 years ago

I wasn't sure if the person that closed it was just some random guy, or a higher-up person at Google. Thanks for clearing this up.

martindale2• 13 years ago

The past 72 hours: Google Reader shutting down, Chrome's RSS extension removed from everyone's browser and the Chrome store, and "implement RSS natively" issue is now set to "wontfix". Way to be evil, Google.

Also posted as a tweet, because fuck being evil: https://twitter.com/martindale/status/313148391624417280

bluebaby• 13 years ago

That's Chromium

doe88• 13 years ago

On this subject I happened to experience something funny. Maybe one year ago I installed a chrome extension (from the official chrome store) to provide an RSS icon directly in the URL bar in order to subscribe to RSS streams. So far so good, then I don't know when, maybe months later I noticed I had some random popups with ads, it was very strange since I use adblock, I tried to find where these ads were coming from, with no luck. Then a day, I used the chrome inspector to analyze a web page and I observed something strange, on every pages I visited an external javascript was loaded, long story short, turned out the chrome extension was a kind of spyware loading a javascript on every pages I visited and sometimes rising a popup. Maybe it took me more time to find it because I only use chrome mainly for testing, my main browser being Firefox, but this is the kind of experience who removed the little confidence I had on the chrome store, and extensions in general, I'm very careful now on what extensions I install particularly extensions needing to be loaded on every pages I visit.

CyberDroiD• 13 years ago

Wow, I don't know about you, but this is amazing to watch.

It's like Google is operating without a head. It's turned vicious and acting offensively against a specific technology.

RSS will live on, of course. Amazing that Google is also so pompous.

bbayer• 13 years ago

Google next move: Remove Adsense for RSS. By the way Google Currents is doing good job as feed reader and it is relatively new product. I don't think Google has declared war to RSS. Since most of its APIs is based on Atom. May be they want to make a transition to JSON based standard.

The 3-year old "Implement RSS natively in Chrome" bug just changed to "WontFix"

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