Mozilla will remove Feed Reader feature on Firefox

Mozilla engineers are ready to remove a very old feature of the Firefox browser – the built-in RSS and Atom reader and real-time bookmarking. Firefox users may be familiar with this feature, but not many people use it. When a user accesses an RSS/Atom source, the browser can display a specific page for the user to preview or subscribe to the source.

Mozilla engineers announced on Bugzilla that they plan to remove the real-time bookmarks feature later this year, saying that only 0.1% of users use this feature, and its code is outdated and difficult to maintain. The last update was seven years ago. Mozilla says it exports the RSS/Atom source that the user subscribes to into an OPML file that the user can then import into a desktop reader or web reader.    

Gijs Kruitbosch, an engineer on the Firefox browser said:

“After careful consideration of various options (which also included doing nothing, or investing heavily in updating the code), we’ve decided to go ahead and remove builtin feed support from Firefox. This metabug covers both the removal and creating public documentation for users (e.g. on support.mozilla.org ) of alternatives.”