Mozilla removes RSS support from Firefox in December

Mozilla will remove RSS support from Firefox by version 64, in December. According to the developer, RSS is used in too few sessions and the relative costs for maintenance are therefore too great. Mozilla refers to add-ons that can take over the task.

Mozilla developer Gijs Kruitbosch announced the decision in a post on his own blog. The feed preview, live bookmarks and subscription ui will no longer be available. Details of existing live bookmarks will be automatically exported to an .opml file upon update to Firefox 64, which should be easily imported by browser RSS add-ons. The live bookmarks themselves will be converted to regular bookmarks.

According to Kruitbosch, RSS is used in 0.01 percent of all Firefox sessions, which would make maintenance costs disproportionate. The way live bookmarks handles the bookmarks database would be outdated and underperforming. Also, the feed reader has its own xml parser that hasn’t had a major update in seven years. In addition, the developer notes that live bookmarks do not work well with podcasts, synchronization and that they do not work at all on the mobile versions of the browser.

The current release version of Mozilla Firefox is 62, which means that the feature will remain temporarily. The release of version 64 is scheduled for December this year. If you really want to keep using Mozilla’s implementation of RSS in Firefox, you can take a little longer with Firefox 60 extended support release. Also, the developer has written a help article to help users find an alternative. Competing browsers, such as Safari and Chrome, don’t support RSS either. Chrome never did and Safari went out in 2012.