[HN Gopher] Chrome testing RSS-powered 'Follow' button
___________________________________________________________________
Chrome testing RSS-powered 'Follow' button
Author : Breadmaker
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-05-19 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5google.com)
| Giorgi wrote:
| Why the hell was it abandoned in the first place?
| J5892 wrote:
| Maybe they figured Google Reader was the future of RSS.
| kevincox wrote:
| This is great news. Sure, it is still "algorithmically curated"
| but at least it pushes sites to have RSS feeds. Then users can
| use the built-in simple Chrome reader or upgrade to something
| more powerful.
|
| My only major concern is that the format of appearing on the New
| Tab Page may encourage short "summary" style feeds instead of
| full-content feeds.
| erikrothoff wrote:
| This is so ironic, because the lack of RSS in Chrome was the
| reason I built the RSS Feed Reader extension for Chrome back in
| 2010 when switching from Firefox.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...
| IceWreck wrote:
| Ah,so RSS is coming back to prominence ? nice.
|
| Meanwhile, we have RSS-Bridge as a bandaid for those sites which
| dont support RSS.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Didn't know RSS-Bridge existed, that's great!
|
| Sadly, I already reinvented the wheel for the primary RSS-less
| site I use (the DoN's ALNAVS listing: https://www.mynavyhr.navy
| .mil/References/Messages/ALNAV-2021...). On my site, myrss.xml
| is a symbolic link to myrss.py, which reads the ALNAVs site,
| parses the main table, updates a sqlite database of titles,
| links, publication dates, and descriptions, and spits out the
| RSS representation of everything in the database.
|
| https://pastebin.com/TeQiWN42
|
| Maybe I'll have to play with RSS-Bridge next time I run into
| something similar!
| onli wrote:
| That's pretty much the use-case (+filtering and merging of
| feeds) for which I resurrected pipes, at
| https://www.pipes.digital/. This specific example might be
| hard to parse though, but you probably already have the
| selectors figured out, then it should be easy to port over.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I wrote up a blog post on an idea of what if google had a site
| that looked similar to youtube, but was links to webpages instead
| of videos. Like youtube it would let you "subscribe". Also like
| youtube if would recommend other articles based on your
| subscriptions and/or clicked links.
|
| My "aha moment", assuming it was an aha moment, was noticing the
| number of views on certain youtube channels and believing that
| blog posts generally don't get a similar number of view. At first
| I thought the obvious reason is people like videos more than blog
| posts. But then I thought, well, maybe one reasons is because
| youtube recommends more things to watch as well as lets you
| subscribe and blog posts don't.
|
| https://games.greggman.com/game/google-like-youtube/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That's a nice idea. You could call it Google Reader, or
| something. Or make it a Youtube-like site that only shows
| Google-hosted "channels" and call it Google Plus!
| evmar wrote:
| Chrome originally integrated RSS feeds in the new tab page, to
| show you when there were new posts on sites you frequently
| visited. We cut the feature just before launch, because it wasn't
| fully baked, and never resurrected it. (I know this because I
| worked on this code.)
|
| With more perspective on the problem, I think the way we
| implemented it at the time was wrong, with the XML processing
| done in unsandboxed C++. At the time, Chrome didn't use any HTML
| for its UI like the new tab page, so only web content was
| sandboxed, but with today's perspective it's obvious to me you
| want to process XML content with the same sandboxing indirection
| you use for other untrusted data formats. So in retrospect I'm
| glad the feature didn't launch as it was, because it would've
| been a security disaster.
|
| Also my recollection is that the code wasn't great. (I feel
| allowed to say that because I authored it -- I'm not slagging on
| my coworkers.)
| mfer wrote:
| RSS is a great piece of technology. It's like plumbing.
|
| What we need is good experience built on top of it.
| rado wrote:
| NetNewsWire
| sthnblllII wrote:
| >if a site doesn't use RSS, Google will fall back to its existing
| content index to keep users updated.
|
| This sounds like an "embrace extend extinguish" strategy.
| Piggyback on websites that have RSS for basic functionality, but
| use Google's control over the browser to ultimately push websites
| into something like update aggregation to "reduce server load"
| that allows Google to track people even when they think they are
| using an open alternative. It's similar to Google's recent move
| on FlOC. Making small easily reversible moves towards an open web
| that protect Google's core position from regulation and users
| choosing alternatives.
|
| EDIT: If Google deserved the benefit of the doubt they wouldn't
| still be reading people's email to build creepy profiles on
| everyone's interests and browsing history. I'm not a fool, I'll
| consider giving them the benefit of the doubt after they stop
| that and delete all the data they have collected.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| They already did the extinguish thing when they killed Google
| Reader to try to prop up the failing Google+ network. RSS never
| recovered from that inflection point. I'm still mad.
| livre wrote:
| You may be right but I want to give them the benefit of the
| doubt, that may be just to keep the UI consistent and avoid the
| trouble of people complaining that they see the button on some
| websites but not on others.
| pschuegr wrote:
| Google is certainly not without faults, but it does not read
| your email. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
| "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads."
|
| Disclaimer: I currently work at Google.
| iaml wrote:
| The fact they are using this phrase implies they may scan or
| read it for other purposes, for example I'm sure they use it
| to train their neural networks. What else? I don't exactly
| know and that's a problem.
| pschuegr wrote:
| It's a valid point, being more explicit would be better. At
| minimum they are scanning it to ensure there are no
| viruses; my assumption is that they are not doing it for
| any other purpose, but that's just an assumption.
|
| To be argumentative, though, I would wager a lot of money
| that you don't know what _exactly_ your SMS messages are
| being scanned for either.
| MR4D wrote:
| Nicely offsets their crappy AMP stuff.
|
| Also allows them to sidestep all sorts of cookie limitations on
| personal data. Smart.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Also allows them to sidestep all sorts of cookie limitations
| on personal data
|
| Can you explain what you mean by that?
| MR4D wrote:
| The simple version (the longer version takes more time than I
| have to write today)....
|
| If 3rd party cookies are blocked, then it's hard for Google
| to know what people are looking at, and also hard to sell ads
| at the highest rates.
|
| However, if you connect an RSS feed into a user's google
| account via a browser button, then you now have access to all
| the things a user likes (by virtue of the fact that the user
| has clicked the follow me button, thereby signaling, "hey,
| I'm interested in this!").
|
| I have no idea how this gets implemented for Google, but if
| there isn't some tie in to their advertising revenue, I'd be
| surprised.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Before there was chrome, browsers use to have native RSS support.
| To this date chrome does not support RSS natively. They are
| responsible for killing RSS. Now they are bringing it back with a
| social media buzz word 'follow'.
|
| This is a shitty play.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Why is it a shitty play? A shitty play would have been
| inventing a new proprietary protocol for this and tying it into
| Google tech somehow.
|
| And "follow" is not a "social media buzz word". "Follow" and
| "Subscribe" have been used for fucking ever in the RSS world,
| long before Facebook was a thing.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Also, people have been following particular stories in the
| news and subscribing to magazines since before the internet
| or for that matter computers.
| hobs wrote:
| because people still just want google reader and this aint it
| asdff wrote:
| Firefox has RSS support until like last year iirc. It wasn't
| chrome that killed that, it was Mozilla shifting engineering
| priorities.
| saurik wrote:
| I would guess that was caused by the death of RSS, not the
| other way around.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I have been an Opera user from v5 till v11 (it became
| unbearable at that point). It had RSS, Email, IRC etc
| support.
|
| I seem to remember both internet explorer and firefox back
| then could open RSS feed albeit poorly in comparison.
|
| Then came chrome. I resisted switching from Opera until it
| became useless, but we had Google Reader for feeds even
| though chrome couldn't read RSS. Reading feeds was not a
| problem until they killed Reader.
|
| Then we were left with chrome with no rss support and no
| Google Reader. Feedly was to bloaty to keep using.
|
| This how i see the progression of chrome killing rss.
| dfabulich wrote:
| I think it's easier to make the case that "Google" killed
| RSS rather than "Chrome." Google certainly killed Google
| Reader.
|
| I understand how you feel; improving RSS support in Chrome
| feels shitty, considering what they did to Reader. Even
| bringing back Google Reader would be unwelcome, at this
| point.
|
| Having said that, since Google killed Reader, it's not the
| least bit clear what would you even want Google to do now,
| in 2021, beyond what they're doing in Chrome. What could
| possibly make amends for killing Google Reader?
| onli wrote:
| There are many alternatives to Feedly. Bazqux is probably
| the best of them. The old reader was back then very similar
| to Google Reader and still looks similar. FreshRSS is a
| very nice option to self-host.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Also there are few cross-platform standalone RSS
| softwares; QuiteRSS and RSS-Guard.
|
| For Chrome alterivates, Vivaldi have native RSS support.
| It need to be enabled in the setting to use RSS.
|
| Also there are tt-rss for selfhosting.
| smbv wrote:
| I actually run my own RSS feed aggregator (FreshRSS) and I can
| tell you that it's great. Combine that with an iOS app like
| NetNewsWire, I have hundreds of sites that are synced between my
| devices. It's actually how I read HN at this point (via hnrss).
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Here's a question... does that 'follow' button actually just
| extract the RSS feed tag from the page, and store it locally for
| use in your new tab page... OR does it do a round robin to Google
| so they can track which feeds are being fetched?
|
| If it's the latter, then no-thank-you.
| barbazoo wrote:
| From the feature it does look like it's a server side feature
| but it might not me.
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| Hopefully this gets adopted en masse! THANK YOU!
| k1m wrote:
| And surprisingly enough, Google News produces RSS feeds for its
| top stories, topics and even searches. Anyone's guess how long
| they'll keep it around.
|
| I wrote about it here: https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-
| news-rss-feeds/
| PretzelFisch wrote:
| Is this going to be a true client side RSS that talks to all 5k
| of websites I follow or a service provided by Google that polls
| for new content? I would be fasinated to see what
| telemetry/buisness objective has them moving back in this
| direction.
| brundolf wrote:
| 1) This makes perfect business sense: Google failed to create its
| own social feed that would stick, so instead it's piggybacking
| off of a standard technology (and I'm sure it'll collect plenty
| of data just like it would from an actual social feed). This is
| what Google did in the early days with other technologies like
| the open web and email, and it's generally a good thing for
| everybody (until they enter the "extend" and "extinguish" phases
| later on)
|
| 2) Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL
| path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed?
| I've already added RSS to my site, but right now there's just a
| home page link to the XML document, I'm not sure how it would be
| auto-discovered for such a "follow" button
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _Question as someone who 's new to RSS: is there a standard
| URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML
| feed?_
|
| Yes. Add a link like this:
|
| <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My
| articles" href="/articles/rss/" />
|
| (Or more likely, application/atom+xml -- rss is not great, atom
| is generally what you want, and what you'll be publishing)
| brundolf wrote:
| Nice! I'll add that. Probably I'll just add both versions.
| clscott wrote:
| Honestly adding both isn't necessary. Just use Atom because
| RSS is an ill defined hodgepodge.
|
| I work for a service that creates "RSS" feeds as a side
| effect of what we do and they've all be Atom for 10+ years
| with no issues.
|
| Please let the RSS format die.
| brundolf wrote:
| I have no horse in this race (I don't even know what Atom
| is tbh; I'm inferring that it's some kind of refined
| subset and/or extension of the RSS spec), and I'd prefer
| my site to be accessible to as many readers as possible.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Atom is basically RSS' successor, fixing some ambiguities
| in RSS' (lack of) spec.
| adtac wrote:
| RSS 2 would've been far less confusing
| eli wrote:
| Unfortunately not. "RSS 2.0" is the current version of
| old rss
| arcbyte wrote:
| RSS is not great but I abhorred atom with a passion back when
| I was working with feeds. It was a way overcomplicated xml
| mess. RSS is so much simpler to work with, you just have to
| deal with less than stellar documentation.
| rakoo wrote:
| There is no standard URL but there is a standard link from the
| website to the feed: the <link> element in the header. See
| https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Generally, you can add a <link> tag in the header, but in
| practice many websites forgo this or mess up the
| implementation, so most feed readers have custom search
| algorithms to try and find them.
|
| Just looked through the Chromium source code, the algorithm for
| finding RSS feeds is here:
| https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...
|
| [0] https://pypi.org/project/feedsearch/ [1]
| https://fetchrss.com/api
| TrianguloY wrote:
| > That said, the algorithmic feed will use your follows to
| surface content.
|
| If this means that feeds will be sorted/hidden based on a black
| box trained to sell me things, sorry but I won't call that rss.
|
| Rss for me is an aggregator, a list where all and every item of
| multiple lists are placed together and sorted chronologically,
| optionally with tags to filter if needed. I choose the lists to
| aggregate, I decide which posts to read and which not, and if I
| don't like the content of a list, I'm the one to remove it. I
| have full control, not an algorithm.
| Kye wrote:
| Seriously. I've already started adding YouTube channels I want
| to follow to Inoreader because Google does such a poor job of
| showing me new videos.
| torstenvl wrote:
| I love RSS and hope this brings it back into the mainstream.
|
| Another article on the front page is about the Amish and
| carefully evaluating how tech fits into your life and values, and
| who it serves.
|
| Applying that here -- RSS _does_ serve those who want to get
| updates from a site, and _does not_ serve advertisers and cookie-
| traffickers. RSS is peak "good old days" of the Web.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I like RSS for serving users trying to get updates from the
| site. But I've heard that it requires creating a massive feed
| file containing many articles, including text and images, which
| can produce a large bandwidth load from clients that pull it
| frequently. As a result, some blogs (like christine.website)
| stopped serving article contents in the RSS feeds.
|
| Is it a problem in practice (cannot be solved by removing
| images or similar)? Could it be improved through smarter
| polling or some "last updated since" header? Or by using an
| "active" RPC-like protocol where the reader specifically
| queries for "list of all articles since this timestamp" and can
| fetch them together or individually, with or without images?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I don't think performance/load has ever been a real reason to
| only serve partial content. The actual reason has always been
| getting users onto the site where you can deliver advertising
| more flexibly along with analytics.
|
| For my extremely minimal site, the RSS feed is still smaller
| than normal pageloads because it only has graphics by
| reference. RSS readers scrape surprisingly often, but the
| file is small and highly cacheable, and most of them do a
| HEAD request only initially and never ask for the file if it
| hasn't changed. Despite accounting for a large percentage of
| _requests_ , RSS clients account for only a small portion of
| traffic. The cool thing is that a lot of these RSS readers
| are shared (commercial feed readers, ttrss instances, etc)
| and so they are caching the feed on their end and actually
| saving me bandwidth vs an equivalent number of users
| accessing the site directly - a lot of these put the
| subscriber account in their UA string so I can see that e.g.
| Feedly is making regular requests during the day but has
| 30-some users behind those requests. It's a better deal from
| a cost-perspective than those 30-some people checking each
| day.
| pantulis wrote:
| RSS was almost killed because it's more difficult to monetize
| the contents for content publishers/creators, not due to
| performance problems. Obviously Google has something in mind.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > But I've heard that it requires creating a massive feed
| file containing many articles, including text and images
|
| So a) no, it doesn't contain images, just URLs to images
| where necessary; an RSS or ATOM feed is just a text XML
| document adhering to a certain schema, and b) the feed file
| is only as big as the site decides it needs to be.
|
| For example, a typical blog or news organization could
| generate a feed containing the last 24 hours worth of new
| content. Feed readers will poll that and pull in new content
| while ignoring existing content.
|
| In short: this should be a non-issue unless you're turning
| out massive amounts of new material on a regular basis, in
| which case you're probably a major news organization and can
| afford it.
|
| > As a result, some blogs (like christine.website) stopped
| serving article contents in the RSS feeds.
|
| This isn't because of bandwidth concerns. This is because
| they can't advertise in an RSS feed so they want to drive
| eyeballs to the site.
|
| Personally, I run ttrss and use a plugin that scrapes the
| content from the source site and embeds it right in my feed.
| As a result I only have to leave my feed reader if I really
| want to for some reason (e.g. to read comments on the
| originating site... like, say, HN!)
| kixiQu wrote:
| To be clear, I don't think it's the case that
| christine.website has any advertising whatsoever (or even
| meaningful JS?) but I think your diagnosis is correct more
| broadly.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| A LOT of sites only serve the article headline and maybe just
| the intro sentence for exactly this reason. Also by forcing
| you to click through, you land on the site proper and feature
| in their visitor counts, AND get to look at ads on the page
| too.
| pantulis wrote:
| Unless you use a "reader mode" capable RSS reader, that is.
| k1m wrote:
| Or use something like this to convert partial feeds into
| full text before subscribing: http://ftr.fivefilters.org
| (a project I work on).
| onli wrote:
| In addition to the answers you got refuting load as a
| problem: "Last updated since" headers are indeed a thing.
| Look for example at how RSS gets cached in wordpress [0] or
| the classical blog engine serendipity [1]. Also, push instead
| of pull is also common. Made popular for feeds by
| pubsubhubbub, since enterprise-ready renamed to WebSub [2].
| Readers like bazqux do support that.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/270f2011f8ec
| 7265...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/e2044472c202a836
| 8774...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
| acdha wrote:
| The load issues were a concern with very early
| implementations around the turn of the century but they're
| really not now. Feeds are usually extremely cacheable and
| readers have supported conditional fetches using If-Modified-
| Since since the early days. These days the average site is
| serving considerably more data in JavaScript, not to mention
| the images and video which you're going to see in any case
| (they're just links in RSS).
|
| The real reason why sites started switching to partial
| content is advertising. This is why personal or corporate
| blogs usually provide full content and some sites like
| ArsTechnica.com offer it to paid subscribers.
| xena wrote:
| Owner of christine.website here. I did stop doing it in the
| atom feed (though i don't remember why) however the RSS and
| JSONFeeds do have article text in them. If you want to do
| more advanced queries against the data I could whip something
| up I guess. It's a really dumb webapp written in Rust and I'm
| more than happy to put some extra fun into it.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| And fortunately, RSS never really went away.
|
| Yeah, there's some sites that have killed their RSS feeds, and
| feeds can be tough to find (though there's browser extensions
| that fix that issue), but most major news organizations,
| blogging platforms, etc, support RSS. And for those that don't
| (including Twitter, Instagram, Github, etc), RSS Bridge can
| often fill the gap:
|
| https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
|
| In short: RSS is my frontend to the web, and it's fantastic!
| tristan957 wrote:
| Do you have a preferred browser extension for finding RSS
| feeds for a site?
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| For Firefox I use Awesome RSS:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
|
| For Chrome I can't vouch for anything recently but I came
| across this a while back:
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-rss-feed-
| url/k...
| gnagatomo wrote:
| I've been use FeedBro for Firefox for the last couple years
| and it's great.
|
| https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
| breput wrote:
| Not the gp but Drop Feeds (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/) is great Firefox RSS reader
| add-on.
|
| It sits in the sidebar and automatically updates so you can
| immediately see when a feed updates, then the feed renders
| in the main panel. This is very useful for news, status
| pages, and things like live YouTube events.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Just about every RSS reader supports discovery if you just
| put in the address you have in the browser. Personally,
| though it'd be nice to see the indicator that a site has an
| RSS feed, I'd rather not clog up my browser with add ons
| and just throw the address in my RSS reader on the rare
| occasion I come across a new site I'd like to follow.
| tootie wrote:
| RSS is still the de facto standard for podcast feeds.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Yeah, until Spotify and Apple have their way and balkanize
| the industry... _sigh_
| jessaustin wrote:
| Rogan disappeared for me when his feed died. No one is
| forcing us to install those apps.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I totally agree and it is not only a step in the direction of
| redistributing the internet and information, but it also
| concerns me a lot that Google is working on this because I have
| next to zero amount of confidence that they will not abuse RSS
| and this will not track you and essentially kill RSS by simply
| taking it over.
|
| What is that dark pattern called again that Microsoft is so
| famous for? ... join and effort, co-opt/compromise it, and then
| take it over and make it their own; leaving the original effort
| totally eviscerated?
|
| Edit: apparently someone else (sthnblllII) smells exactly the
| same trap but knew the term/phrase; "embrace extend
| extinguish".
| barbazoo wrote:
| I think you're correct in that this doesn't seem to serve
| advertisers and given that this looks like a server side
| (Google) feature, I won't assume this is going to be around for
| long.
| fragileone wrote:
| This feature doesn't preclude Google putting ads on the RSS
| reader page. All Google has to do is put an algorithm on the
| feed and they've made it a Twitter or Medium competitor.
| jsnell wrote:
| This appears to be basically another mode of operation for
| Discover, which definitely has ads. (At least on Android. Not
| sure if on Chrome yet.)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| RSS is kinda old hat these days. ActivityStreams can express
| everything that RSS is used for, and more - the whole Fediverse
| ecosystem is entirely built on the ActivityStreams standard.
| This move from the Chrome developers just feels like too
| little, too late.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Rss/atom can be static files, AS can't.
| shrikant wrote:
| Without even looking it up, I'd hazard that Chrome has at
| least a couple orders of magnitude more users than the
| Fediverse.
|
| This renders any move the Chrome developers make available
| and usable to something approaching an actual critical mass
| of usage, even if it is a less open standard.
|
| And I say this as a Firefox user and someone who wants open
| standards to win out over whatever corporate lock-in Google
| decide to roll out.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-19 23:01 UTC)