In the old Google, it would have been easier for anyone to just fix this internally.

(Disclaimer: work at Google but not on anything related to this; all my information comes from links in this HN thread. Which is ironic / symptom of the same problem.)

[1]: https://front-end.social/@bramus/111448166340277056 and https://github.com/bramus/web-dev-rss / https://github.com/bramus/chrome-for-developers-rss

[2]: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog

[3]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2

This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.

I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.

The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.

People always assume some ulterior motive to every single decision google does, but things are often much simpler than that, and mostly all it comes to prioritization...

And well profit motives push managements decisions so it's no wonder it never got prioritized. Nothing nefarious about it. RSS makes Google no money.

And the culture changed at the same time. Lots of seemingly needless rules to protect rising fiefdoms that started the sclerosis that only got worse over time. Gamergate internally felt like a Civil War waged over Google+.

Google+ itself was the height of Google’s hubris, thinking they could kill a beloved product (Google Reader) to kill a different company’s beloved (at the time) product, Facebook. I remember being deeply disappointed with the release of Google+ like I was when the Segway was released. All this hype and promise for a secret product built with an enormous group of highly-talented people, kept away from the teeming masses of similarly talented people that could’ve told them that it was a dumb idea and here are the reasons why.

Really, if I had to blame one thing, it would be Google+ because of the corrosive effects of social media. Before Google+, my colleagues were just my colleagues who brought their whole selves to the office but we still mostly talked about work. Folks had mailing lists I wasn’t subscribed to where they would talk about their abhorrent political beliefs so I wouldn’t find out about them.

And then, all of a sudden, after Google+ came out, some guy I thought was cool revealed that he didn’t want women to be able have abortions. And some other guy was a randroid, hellbent on not understanding that taxes pay for roads. And on and on…seemingly everyone just spent a lot of time being mad at each other.

Obviously it’s hard for me to point to a specific thing or time period, but the writing was on the wall in the early 2010s (to me, anyways) and I bounced by the middle of the decade.

I don’t think it was ever staffed heavily (and that long piece on the product released earlier this year will attest to that) but if Google was going to go “all-in” on social, then to some leaders, everything else that might seem like a half-measure had to die.

It’s why it was killed despite what felt like half the company being willing to volunteer to keep it running.

Old Google would’ve let it live and let folks in their 20% time keep it running.

I know they still dabble in search but that’s not the point.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...

We moved our site to a different infrastructure that doesn't support the automatic generation of RSS feeds.

I'm painfully aware that this isn't the best solution right now. I needed our team to hit a deadline for migrating all the content to the new system, and then manage cleanup of known missing functionality after.

We are working on making sure this lands asap.

Paul

I had been wondering why https://developer.chrome.com/feeds suddenly died.

> I needed our team to hit a deadline

Why?

The majority of corporate deadlines are fictional in the sense that there is not a regulatory or legislative component to them, so it's easy to hand-wave them away and say that $THING should be a higher priority than the deadline. But that doesn't make them any less real for the people who have that deadline imposed by their boss (or more realistically, their boss's boss's boss's boss).

There is a freeze to the new infrastructure's product features until after the new year and we needed to get this in before then (we can land feed support without a product feature change)

The people I have working on the older infrastructure will be on new projects for our team in the new year.

In a blog post two months ago you said, "I've taken the decision..." https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration

There was clearly someone in Google management who decided that RSS could be broken.

Why is this important? Well, for example, it seems that the RSS feed was already broken when this important announcement was posted: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to...

They were my decisions based on all the data I had, including launching with what we had.

re: "Resuming the transition to Manifest V3" this was posted on the old infrastructure and should have been in your RSS feeds up until late last week when our migration happened - so for just under a month... I can check more to make sure what I am saying is correct, but the migration only happened last week.

This is a false dichotomy. I wasn't questioning the decision to migrate platforms, I was questioning "the deadlines, feature freezes, and project reshuffling".

> there are always ongoing migrations between "the old system that is deprecated and the new system that is not ready yet" — but that is "just" a cultural problem rather than anyone consciously deciding that RSS could be broken.

I disagree, because whenever you migrate, some features are considered essential and others inessential. Someone consciously decided that RSS was among the inessential features in this specific case. The "culture" did not make that specific decision.

This is the developer relations team. How can you have relations with developers when they don't even see your announcements? The essential part is the communication with outside developers, not the internal CMS.

> they've done the best they can in the meantime, filing a bug with the platform, creating the https://developer.chrome.com/feeds info page acknowledging the issue, and even creating unofficial feeds.

How were developers supposed to know any of this? I had no idea until now.

And yes, in the decision between "keep maintaining a custom infrastructure" and "switch to a common infrastructure", someone must have decided that RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (or indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems reasonable and what my previous post was about, including the "probably just not a big factor" bit you quoted above. It looks like they're planning to add this support though.

There was production breakage! The RSS feeds broke. That's the entire point of this HN submission and discussion.

> Once you've decided a couple of months earlier to do a migration, doing it "before the freeze" is also a natural deadline to pick, for migrating to the new infrastructure

Why? Migrations almost always break stuff, right? So why would you break stuff when "a lot of people are on vacation" and thus can't fix the breakage? It seems to me the natural and logical choice would be to wait until after the new year to migrate. What sense does it make to break stuff and then go on vacation?

> RSS support is not an essential feature whose lack should block (indefinitely postpone) the migration; this seems natural (especially if you think you can add it back in a few weeks / months)

It's interesting that you say "indefinitely" postpone but then turn around right away and say "a few weeks/ months".

If we waited several weeks until after the christmas break, we'd lose a lot of mental context. It's also a horrible dark cloud hanging over your head. When dealing with a big migration, it's really ideal to do it while everything is still fresh. Context switching can be very expensive

As for the rest, I was just explaining the general idea of a production freeze. If you're going to stop trying to make changes by a certain date "to be safe"; then that's the freeze date. Equivalently: people keep trying (and sometimes rushing) to do things until the actual freeze date. The date is early enough (quite a bit earlier than Dec 24) so that there's still enough time and people left to fix things or roll back, if there are genuine emergencies. This replaces the risk of production breakage with the risk of embarrassment/questions from asking for approval for an emergency fix during the freeze period, so people will still only do things they're fairly confident will be safe. Anyway, none of this is relevant unless lack of RSS support is considered a production breakage, which is the very point of disagreement here.

Sorry about the "few weeks / months" comment; I was editing it out while you were posting your comment. But yes, when deciding whether something is a blocker, it's safer to assume that it can take indefinitely long (until it actually exists), even if you think (or have been promised) that it will be quick. It's the difference between taking the mean versus the 95th percentile of the distribution of time estimates.

Of course it's production breakage. You can't redefine it to not be "production" breakage just because you make a distinction between essential and non-essential features to pull the trigger on the migration. If the migration only supports 75% of the previous features, then 25% of the previous features are broken in production after the migration. If you're ok with that, then ok, but let's not pretend there's no production breakage. The RSS feeds were in production, and then they broke. That's production breakage. What else would you call it?

> As for the rest, I was just explaining the general idea of a production freeze.

I don't need that explained.

> Anyway, none of this is relevant unless lack of RSS support is considered a production breakage, which is the very point of disagreement here.

I think you're the only one who doesn't think RSS support isn't production breakage. Otherwise, Google wouldn't be "actively working on a solution."

I'm leaning toward giving the benefit of the doubt in this case, but why be oblique like this? Why not say "We are working on adding RSS" or "we are aiming to restore RSS support"?

> RSS is alive https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml

* Google Reader is often cited as the best RSS Reader but was killed, which reduced amount of users (I never used it, thus can't judge it)

* Many publishers want people to go to their site, thus don't provide full feeds, only headlines and limit it in additional ways.

* People went to Twitter and Facebook as their news aggregators, depending on the social graph to preselect "relevant" news.

Aside I think the pure list of entries only works to a limited degree for news sites: in RSS all articles are equal, but for news many people want to see the "main" news highlighted as on a news page. For some of my feeds on some news days the feed is barely usable when they push a main story combined with different detail articles, making it hard to find the main story (for instance on election day there is a main article for summary and then bunch of articles for different districts, different parties, ... which appear equal while they aren't equal, also the article with first results is already outdated and replaced ...)

1. Google Reader was not necessarily the best reader. The anger and frustration with the handling of Google Reader lies in the fact that Google Reader was the first reader from a major tech company. That essentially killed all the other innovation in this space and then Google Reader was itself killed in such a short span that there wasn’t an opportunity to have a smooth transition for the entire industry with it.

2. The one spade that did see a lot of competition growth and innovation were off-web RSS clients (precisely because Google Reader wasn’t a player in this space). But even these were completely handicapped by the elimination of Google Reader because Google Reader has become the de facto syncing solution for your RSS list and read states, etc. Again, the short time between announcement and end of life meant many of the popular clients couldn’t find a smooth transition for their users.

3. Google Reader had a social network effect component where someone could publish RSS articles they were reading and others could subscribe to their feed. In this sense it almost acted as an alternative to Twitter. The Twitter implosion has shown exactly how hard it is for alternatives to a social network to arise (because you invariably get many alternatives and it’s hard to get everyone onto one).

And the RSS reader social network space was nascent so the fragmentation as a result of the destruction of Google Reader meant a lot of people migrated to Twitter instead (Google had hoped they would migrate to Google+ instead but Google+ was awful so that didn’t happen).

For me it shows an alert asking if I want to subscribe in my installed feed reader.

Safari "development" is such an odd bag of changes. I sill miss the old dashboard widget maker that let you select a section of just about any page and use it as a widget.

No FTP, RSS, etc.

At least with RSS, I can manually parse the XML in a pinch.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/1671/9

Opera (my main browser back then) use to have so much stuff built in (RSS, email, IRC, note taking, mouse gestures). Chrome use to have a resizable extension bar recently. OneNote use to have a more colorful and compact UI. Start menu and taskbar used to be useful before windows 11/10/8.

Reminds of an article posted here about removing less used keys/letters from keyboard. https://www.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock/

Apple has done this with their laptops. When you plug them in, open the laptop, or press any key on the keyboard, they boot up.

I shut mine down to clean over the keyboard area and it kept booting up on me. It was extremely frustrating and there is no setting to simply turn it off.

I found this…

“Press and hold the left Control and Command buttons with the right Shift button for a total of 7 seconds. Without releasing them, press the Power button and hold them all together for an additional 7 seconds. Your Mac can only be powered on by using the Power button.”

I haven’t tried it, but it apparently only works as a one-off, so this silly process would need to be done each time the user wants the system to stay off.

Considering the laptops still have a power button, this seems crazy to me. Maybe they are preparing to remove it.

So not saying Vivaldi's RSS is bad, mostly want to mention that Thunderbird can do RSS too, if one happens to use it anyway.

Less distributed/democratized machine/automation friendly... But definitely automation friendly for giant search scrapers, with lots of compute, cash, IP blocks and AI.

I'd like to change that. I originally created BrowserBox^0 as a platform to serve "web scraping authoring tools". These tools are normally served as extensions, or even downloadable electron apps. But what about something easier to distribute, more powerful, more lightweight, and less beholden to walled-garden gatekeeping? BrowserBox changes all that, as it's clientless and runs in a regular web browser even on mobile. Anyone can build a scraping script on top of it, even from your mobile device while riding the bus. That's the vision anyway. But I got side-tracked by how the "embeddable browser" is a useful product in its own right. I still intend to return to fulfilling its original purpose however.

The key is to build a good "extensions-like"-but better-API atop the Chrome DevTools protocol and our BrowserBox functionality. We're open source so come visit if you'd liked to get involved or check it out! :)

0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

> GAM is a command line tool for Google Workspace admins to manage domain and user settings quickly and easily.

I need this about once per year, but every time it's invaluable.

That's not a fair comparison. There's a big difference between your own ad hoc shell script (or command line or whatever) that you fully understand, and downloading and running third party code without any kind of audit.

Meanwhile, the industry keeps talking about "software supply chain".

There is, but somehow, rather than being a workspace API, it's a GCP api ; and so if you want to use it, there is a big step to climb.

Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.

But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.

> Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.

Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner

People would always be complaining that Google wouldn't index their pages for months but if you: (1) burn an RSS feed, (2) subscribe to the burned feed, and (3) add items to the feed, the items would be indexed almost immediately.

I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.

(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)

Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.

Perhaps I should interview at Google and teach them my amazing solution.

> Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution.

Well, that certainly means they are going to have RSS feeds in the future. Right?

RSS could be that solution!

Did Google develop a new internal blogging platform and just didn't get around to supporting RSS?

https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/11144816695...

Yeah exactly, what kind of bs is that

   curl -sA "" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sitemap.xml \
   |sed -n '
   1i\
   \
   \
   
   s}\(\)\(.*\)\(\)}\
   \
   \
   \2\
   \2\
   }p;
   $a\
   \
   
   ' 

NB. The public sitemap.xml still refers to an (unofficial?) RSS feed.

The last article pushed to the feed was "Changes to the web.dev infrastructure" few months ago https://web.dev/blog/webdev-migration

The feed still there but with no updates https://web.dev/feed.xml and on the site you can see new articles published.

Is sad that on a infrastructure revamp of a modern site, the RSS feed was left out of the features list (at least for now).

https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/11144816695...

Please, Expose Your RSS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595855

I'm still angry at Google for killing Reader. It was the best way to consume content on the web.

RSS is a menace to Google's bottom line!

I never used Reader so I'm not genuinely curious, what about it makes it difficult for someone to just create a copy of the service?

Google reader was the alpha and Omega of RSS feed reading, and it set a standard norm followed by the rest of the internet, and Google's decision to move on from RSS similarly was followed by much of the rest of the internet. If, in the heyday of Google Reader, you asked me what one thing could drive the stake through the heart of RSS, it would be Google making some choice to drive norms and standards of the web in a different direction.

It used to be a standard to have the RSS icon side by side with the Twitter and Facebook icons, but in the present day that tends not to happen.

Twitter itself used to have RSS feeds, Google News used to have RSS feeds, Craigslist used to, those are all gone to my knowledge. RSS tools used to be native to browsers, and now there are numerous RSS tools out there to manually build feeds to make up for the lack of feeds on sites where people want them. Magazines in particular sometimes don't have them, such as Vogue magazine. And you can look at the prevalence of searches for RSS feeds by users and see in trends over time that people are searching for RSS less frequently.

Journalists depended on Reader the way they came to depend on Twitter. They didn't move to another reader.

As for my search engine, I genuinely don't track my users, so I really don't have the fainest how many users I have. 4 people or a million people use my search engine, and I make the same amount of money from it. If I want the search engine to do well, I have to use my own eyes to assess how well it performs.

Once you learn about Venn diagrams it's going to completely blow your mind. One easy first pass at making inferences as to best services is to use popularity as an imperfect first proxy. So if someone says that a service became a de facto standard used by all of the internet, it's one of the ways to helpfully frame the conversation about whether the service proved to be useful. Of course there will be exceptions, but it's one of those functional literacy things where everyone can understand the significance of why people would bring that up in the context of a conversation that ultimately was closing in on making assessments about the value of the user experience.

Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.

And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.

Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.

I completely reject this analysis, as there are numerous counterexamples of things that are popular but not good, or good but not popular. One does not inform the other, especially in this case where it appears to have derived much of its popularity from Google shoving it onto users by featuring it in their other services.

> Google's RSS reader was simple, ad free, fast, had an elegant design, didn't attempt to push superfluous services or subscriptions, set a standard for accessible anywhere at a time when many popular RSS readers were used on the desktop, and, in contrast to most of the best services now around, was free. I would go so far as to say it was almost unimproveable because it had one job and it did it correctly and didn't try to do other things, which used to be one of the things Google did best.

Now that actually answers my question, but not the question of why someone couldn't just copy this design and carry on when Reader was shut down, which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.

> And I feel like none of this information is new, hard to discover, controversial, but is instead part of the generally accepted canon of internet history. So it's a bizarre question to me, if I'm being honest.

Well as I stated in the original question, I never used reader.

> Edit: regarding the prevalence of RSS adoption in the present day, it may be true that as a numeric total there are more sites using it, but that as a percentage it is down. The same way that a winning candidate for president from the 1940s will have fewer votes then a losing candidate from the present day. Numbers will grow over time just due to population growth. Or in the case of the internet, The growth in the number of sites. But to understand whether RSS enjoys the same status as a de facto standard it's necessary to look at more than just the numbers, but at the proportion of adoption today compared to the proportion as an existed in the past.

Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS. The websites that tend to not have RSS are very large silo-like websites with enough gravity well to retain users regardless, but these website are by definition few in number and will not affect the statistics in any way.

In the past, it was more common with hand rolled HTML websites, that did not have RSS. These have almost all been supplanted by CMS:es and blog platforms that universally do support RSS.

Yikes, did you miss the part where I explicitly acknowledged that there are counterexamples? And since you missed it the first time, I guess I'm going to repeat it again here for emphasis. Yes, there are indeed counterexamples. Broad brush inferences always have counterexamples, and nevertheless are useful indicators. I spent a whole paragraph talking about the functional literacy of understanding why it's a good first approximation. People drive Priuses, people use iPhones, people listen to Taylor Swift. And each of those cases there's a a Venn diagram overlap between popularity and positive user experience where the former can be a proxy for the latter. If you genuinely don't understand how that argument works there's a functional literacy issue here. Moreover, there are counterexamples but this isn't one of them! This specific case, is one of those cases where popularity and positive user experience coincide, which was the whole point to begin with. Being obtuse about how those are connected is just a waste of everybody's time.

>Now that actually answers my question,

Well the crux of this conversation has been that this is an obtuse question in the first place, and that your preferred framing of the question in terms of user experience to the exclusion of popularity was an obtuse refusal to understand the significance of how those things meaningfully overlap, and it was obtuse in the sense of ignoring a broader conversation about mainstream adoption of RSS. The conversation was about that but you wanted to specifically turn it into an end user question.

>which seems like it would have been a recipe for success given the outcry and hunger for Readeer.

Copies of it do exist, often with features paywalled. Part of the downward spiral from de facto standard to boutique experience.

>Even looking at the proportion, it's more than likely still higher today, at least in terms of websites-with-RSS.

However you measure it, it is no longer the de facto standard that it once was. You don't see the RSS icon next to the social media icons on websites. Google News, Twitter, and craigslist removed their RSS functionality, mainstream browsers have removed their built-in RSS functionality, and, again I have to raise the functional literacy thing, because look at what you're saying. The best justifications of RSS are this combination of scaffolding and duct tape about how if you squint and think about it you can still find it, it's just an entirely different universe than it being a de facto standard.

TheOldReader.com is also very good (UI is very heavily Google Reader inspired).

I’m happy, it lead to an explosion of available readers, including many self-hosted ones.

[1] https://www.saltydog-grrr.com/category/crisps

That’s the best solution if you’re on Apple.

Internet users can't have nice things.

For now this can be used: https://chrome-for-developers-rss.bramus.workers.dev/blog or /articles or /case-studies

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/314910854#comment2

Loss of the ability to contribute via GitHub pull request is unfortunate, hopefully there will be a better way to contribute again in the future.

Sadly yes, Presto died many moons ago. I still miss the old Opera, when it wasn't owned by a Chinese company and had it's own rendering engine. But building a browser is expensive, a rendering engine even more so. We won't pay the cost of developing software, so we can't have nice things.

Also, I note the wording of the error message, that they're actively working on it.

- commercial AI refusing to generate RSS XMLs from a webpages' content. - "illegal" AI that is willing to browse webpages without disclosing that their'e bots

Sometimes I think the jokes about Google having no management are true.

please donate: https://patreon.com/leafac

- https://changedetection.io/#features

- https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

> Create RSS feeds based on changes in web content

Now, what's Google's goal to monetize social networks? They have non as far as I know. They lost all opportunities in the social space and they lost their lead in RSS. The Web lost too.

that’s the world Google wants. Money sloshing around the system and them getting a cut each time.

https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

Google management too busy doing evil

As I can no longer watch yt without getting annoyed, looks like it's time to get a new email provider (as well) .

@ yahoo seem to have few(er?) problems.

There are probably others. Can anyone recommend a good search engine?

uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger should take care of it. I've never seen any ads on YouTube (except the ones the stream includes inherently).

Are you sure your experience is common rather than anecdotal?

In a cohesive organization they would improve Blogger to fulfill their needs, but instead they just waste resources recreating a one-off solution over and over again.