The plan to remove RSS support in Firefox becomes more specific. The responsible Mozilla developer now describes the planned transition for users and repeats again the arguments for the support end of the free weaving technique.
Support for RSS feeds in version 64 of Firefox should be abolished this coming December. For about three months, it is known that Mozilla wants to stop supporting the RSS technology and the so-called dynamic bookmarks. Kruitbosch now also describes the transition planned for users in his blog.
According to this, existing dynamic bookmarks should be exported to an OPML file. After you can update to version 64, which can then be imported by external feed readers. The dynamic bookmarks in the Firefox browser are replaced by normal ones that point to the URL that was previously associated with the dynamic bookmark. Affected users will also be directed to a support page for more information that the team has created.
As justification for the end of the support Kruitbosch repeats already known arguments. So both the technology and the code in Firefox to support very old and error-prone, which could endanger the security of users. In addition, only about 0.01 percent of Firefox users use RSS support altogether.
The existing RSS support also no longer works properly with techniques such as podcasts or syncing bookmarks. RSS support can not be used in the mobile browsers of Firefox, too. The dynamic bookmarks also have no concept of recognizing whether certain feed entries have been read or not. To create all this missing functionality, however, was too much effort for the team. Instead, users will in future use external feed readers or Webextensions implemented Firefox add-ons that support RSS.