Say goodbye to your RSS Feed subscriptions and previews in Firefox

Mozilla announces that starting with the future Firefox 64 release in December 2018, the browser will drop core product support for RSS/Atom feed preview and subscription features. The browser maker explains that these features have long had an outsized maintenance and security cost, and that just 0.01 percent of sessions use these features.

To update the RSS features of Firefox to modern standards would require a ton of work, a task Mozilla is no longer willing to do as there are now improved replacements available via add-ons.

As one example of those costs, “live bookmarks” use a very old, very slow way to access the bookmarks database, and it would take a lot of time and effort to bring it up to the performance standards we expect from Quantum. Likewise, the feed viewer has its own “special” XML parser, distinct from the main Firefox one, and has not had a significant update in styling or functionality in the last seven years. The engineering work we’d need to bring these features, in their current states, up to modern standards is complicated by how few automated tests there are for anything in this corner of the codebase.