Firefox Live Bookmarks

» see mozilla.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Firefox 1.0 shipped on 9 November 2004 with a short list of things Internet Explorer did not have. Tabs were on it, and so was popup blocking. So were Live Bookmarks, which is the feature that quietly taught a generation of users what RSS was without ever using the acronym in the interface.

The mechanic was elegant and required almost no explanation. If a page declared a feed in its <head>, an icon appeared in the address bar. Click it, pick the feed, and Firefox created a bookmark folder. The folder then behaved like a folder, except its contents were the latest items from that site, refreshed on a schedule you never configured. There was no inbox, no unread count, and no account. Your subscriptions were bookmarks, so they synced and backed up like bookmarks.

That design is also why the feature aged out. A reader with no unread state cannot tell you that you have fallen behind, which was exactly the appeal in 2004 and exactly the reason Google Reader took that audience after launching in October 2005. People who cared about feeds moved to something that tracked what they had read.

By 2018 Mozilla had the telemetry to say so precisely. Bug 1477667, filed as a meta bug to remove feed reader and live bookmark support, put feed preview and subscription usage at roughly 0.01 percent of sessions. The announcement landed in October 2018 and the code came out in Firefox 64 on 11 December 2018.

Firefox 1.0 arrived while I was at university, and for the next several years it was the browser I installed on anything I was allowed to install software on. The feed icon sat in the address bar of every one of those installs. I understood what it did, I used it the way nearly everyone used it, which is to say I made folders that I then stopped opening, and the headlines kept arriving in them for years with nobody reading.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how you subscribed ~

Discovery was the part that mattered and the part nobody credits. A site put one line in its head element, Firefox noticed, and the browser offered a subscription without the user ever learning that a feed had a URL. Compare that to the normal path, which involved spotting an orange button somewhere in a page's furniture, copying a link, and pasting it into a separate application. Live Bookmarks collapsed that into a single click in the window you already had open.

Internet Explorer 7 copied the idea in 2006 with the Windows RSS Platform, and Safari had its own version. For a stretch in the middle of the decade, feed autodiscovery was simply something browsers did, which is the closest RSS ever came to being a consumer feature rather than a technical one.

~ the 0.01 percent ~

Mozilla's reasoning in the removal bug is worth reading because it is unusually plain about the arithmetic. The feed code was an independent parser handling untrusted input from arbitrary sites, carried its own preview renderer, and had been getting no attention for years. That combination is a security liability, and the only thing keeping it in the build was a user base too small to measure properly.

The Register covered the removal under a headline about euthanasia, and the comment threads filled with people who had not realized the feature was still shipping.

~ the opml file ~

Mozilla did the decent thing on the way out. When Firefox 64 upgraded a profile that held live bookmarks, it exported them to an OPML file written to the user's desktop, in the format every standalone feed reader imports. Then it pointed users at add-ons for the functionality it had just removed, which is how a browser feature becomes an extension and then becomes nothing.

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