Q: Where did RSS go in Safari 6???

erebos wrote:

 

Apple is well aware that a large part of their base is highly impressionable, fickle, and actively forming life-long opinions about things. Anything that doesn't fit into their social world will be obsolete and Apple knows it. People like us who come to forums like this and bicker over the merits of RSS are a minority by a gigantic margin... Every article on the internet has a share button, this is how people become aware of new content now.

Apple with Steve Jobs at the reigns changed my life (Apple IIe, original Mac and desktop GUI, HyperCard, original OS X, original iPhone, dissing Adobe Flash). Apple sparked and enabled my tech career that paid off big so I own homes in a couple of the nicest towns in the world, travel with my family whenever and wherever I want, and can donate money and time to local and global charities. Thanks to Steve Jobs, the Woz and the other disruptive doers at Apple 1976-2010 for that!

I hope that Apple post-Jobs doesn't entirely go the way of other disruptive tech companies before them like IBM, Microsoft and Google -- turning into a sugar water reseller (e.g. Bieber iTunes downloads and Angry Bird apps). Will someone growing up in this new Socially Popular Apple decade leverage them to strike it rich (e.g. Angry Birds creator) -- sure!

For us middle aged nutters who dig RSS, RDF, etc... I guess there's still Canonical with their Ubuntu Linux distro if this trend continues to rot the Unix ethos of the original OS X -- just will miss the days of Jobs when I'm running OS X 11 on a VM alongside my Windows VMs, on an Ubuntu DIY laptop...

Oh I almost forgot, the biggest reason I want RSS feeds over everything else and the reason I think Apple dropped them, is that I want to view content by going directly to the source, not some aggregator, or middle man like twitter (or Apple in the future) that can profit from analyzing my interests and viewing habits.

I miss the RSS reader too. It was one of the things that kept me with Safari.

The reason why I'm "investing" any of my limited time in this discussion thread is that someone or some group's decision at Apple to remove Safari 5's simply beautiful RSS functionality has made my work day less productive. Will this investment pay off? Probably not, but at least I won't have any regrets about having rolled over and played brain dead while the inmates take over the asylum.

Should I give up and join the social media collective hive brain -- hey I have plenty to FBrag about via the new Share features like my latest track car RS6 turbo upgrades or griping to my FBriends about how my new D800's 36MP sensor forced me to spend thousands on pricey new Nikkor lenses. But silly me, I try to contribute to society so I work with a skeleton crew at an underfunded public research university where I'm a lead on an open source+open data effort that supports global research collaboration. The Safari 6 upgrade broke a productive workflow that I'd grown to rely on to stay on top of 40+ RSS feeds relevant to this work. No warning, and apparently there will be no apology. This created some real angst that fueled my earlier replies. Will this lesser productivity impact me personally -- not really. Will it impact my work (funded by you the taxpayer) -- a little. Will it impact my decision to push our new developer hire this fall to buy a MacBook Pro instead of an Ubuntu laptop that is most popular in our open source community? Likely.

Can I replicate Safari 5's simply beautiful RSS functionality by crawling into a rat hole of third party Safari plugins and apps? Maybe, but it WILL NOT be simply beautiful.

"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." Steve Jobs 1998

Maybe this is the future of RSS (click „Notification Time“ and „Go!“ to test the html5-feature). I'm not sure if I'm happy with that.

Ties-Malte wrote:

 

Maybe this is the future of RSS (click „Notification Time“ and „Go!“ to test the html5-feature). I'm not sure if I'm happy with that.

Indeed it is! Thanks for that link!

neil456 wrote:

 

If you want to let the internet be optimized for teenagers and followers, then fine, but please let others fight for a more open internet where we get to choose what we want to view.  It used to be a right of passage as young people grew out of being teenagers, now its a celebrated lifestyle.  What a loss.  But its only a loss of expectation, which is somthing you and I can change.

Who's stopping you from seeing something on the Internet? No one. Just get a d@mn RSS reader. The RSS feeds are still there. Choose the ones you want and view them already.

As far as FaceBook, you might be all grown up and better than that stuff, but I'm an adult (over 50) and all my friends and family are on FaceBook. In fact yesterday I was hanging out in NYC with some FaceBook friends, one being a internationally known singer/songwriter, and the other a Grammy winning record producer/songwriter.  How about you? Sitting home reading RSS feeds?    There's lots of cool people on FaceBook.

Aha! Found this.... dated July 25, 2012

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5400

“Description: A cross-site scripting issue existed in the handling of feed:// URLs. This update removes handling of feed:// URLs.”

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-0678

This is why the feeds won't work! I imagine another update will restore it, once they have fixed the issue.

Message was edited by: skydivertak

s4lex wrote:

 

The reason why I'm "investing" any of my limited time in this discussion thread is that someone or some group's decision at Apple to remove Safari 5's simply beautiful RSS functionality has made my work day less productive.

Oh BS man! Try an RSS reader like Vienna. It's better. Honest. I Missed RSS in Safari for like a couple of minutes. First I used NetNewsWire and then from reconmendation here Vienna. They are very similar, but I like Vienna better.

You will be just as productive, though I'm not sure how reading websites makes anyone productive. If you want to be productive, get off the internet!

You will for the first time see all your feeds in one window. Safari can't do that.

Sorry, but this beats Safari hands down.

Ties-Malte wrote:

 

Maybe this is the future of RSS (click „Notification Time“ and „Go!“ to test the html5-feature). I'm not sure if I'm happy with that.

Let me be clear, I do not and will not support any form of notification for RSS type info.  I do NOT wan't some website someplace interrupting me when I am working (which can be all hours of the day), unlike most teenagers that sit on their bed and wait for friends to post something important.

David Schwab wrote:

 

Who's stopping you from seeing something on the Internet? No one. Just get a d@mn RSS reader. The RSS feeds are still there. Choose the ones you want and view them already.

 

As far as FaceBook, you might be all grown up and better than that stuff, but I'm an adult (over 50) and all my friends and family are on FaceBook. In fact yesterday I was hanging out in NYC with some FaceBook friends, one being a internationally known singer/songwriter, and the other a Grammy winning record producer/songwriter.  How about you? Sitting home reading RSS feeds?    There's lots of cool people on FaceBook.

Here's an idea then...  How about you go and hangout with your FB friends and keep out of conversations that you have nothing useful to add to?!?

The question marks in the original post were not literal...  it was a retorical question.

We're not looking for snarky, smart-*** comments from the peanut gallery.  We're expressing our frustrating and dissatisfaction that Apple has removed a highly used feature that was not in anyones way (if they did it to make thing's easier, then I'm at a loss for how it was hard to begin with).

If you have something useful to add to the conversation, then fine.  If not; well, no one asked for your opinion.

skydivertak wrote:

 

Aha! Found this.... dated July 25, 2012

 

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5400

 

“Description: A cross-site scripting issue existed in the handling of feed:// URLs. This update removes handling of feed:// URLs.”

 

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-0678

 

This is why the feeds won't work! I imagine another update will restore it, once they have fixed the issue.

 

Message was edited by: skydivertak

Bingo! This has to be it.

"Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Apple Safari before 6.0 allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via a feed:// URL."

If you look at Mountain Lion, you can see that Apple is big on security features, with Gatekeeper, et al.  So they are probably working on fixing that, and couldn't do it before the release of ML.

Apple wants to make sure they can continue to flaunt OS Xs security over Windows.

David Schwab wrote:

 

s4lex wrote:

 

The reason why I'm "investing" any of my limited time in this discussion thread is that someone or some group's decision at Apple to remove Safari 5's simply beautiful RSS functionality has made my work day less productive.

Oh BS man! Try an RSS reader like Vienna. It's better. Honest. I Missed RSS in Safari for like a couple of minutes. First I used NetNewsWire and then from reconmendation here Vienna. They are very similar, but I like Vienna better.

 

You will be just as productive, though I'm not sure how reading websites makes anyone productive. If you want to be productive, get off the internet!

 

You will for the first time see all your feeds in one window. Safari can't do that.

 

Sorry, but this beats Safari hands down.

Again, no one asked for your opinion.  Great, you love the fact that you have to change apps to see "all your feeds in one window".  I don't.  At all.  Not even a little bit.

Just because you LOVE dub-step/jazz/classical/etc... doesn't mean everyone else is going to dig it.

We're not talking about a massively invasive feature that takes over the entire browsing experience and makes it's difficult for new-comers to learn Safari.  There was, seemingly, no good reason to remove this execellent feature (and no, a cross-site scripting error is not a reason to remove a feature -- it's a reason to fix the scripting error).

skydivertak wrote:

 

“Description: A cross-site scripting issue existed in the handling of feed:// URLs. This update removes handling of feed:// URLs.”

 

This is why the feeds won't work! I imagine another update will restore it, once they have fixed the issue.

 

Message was edited by: skydivertak

Except for the missing word 'temporarily'.  Apple wordsmiths do not make that kind of mistake.  Not saying they won't change their mind.

Hi David -- thanks for the suggestion. As I posted in an earlier reply, I've already wasted time due to this lame brained decision by someone at Apple. I can't get that time back, as the Safari 6 upgrade trashed my read/unread history for 40+ technical work-related blogs. I don't know what kind of work you do, but if you are working on the development of leading edge open source software and open data standards that are relatively undocumented (there's no Dummies book for the work I'm engaged in currently), technical blogs are an invaluable resource.

I also find useful information related to my work via the smart folks I follow on Twitter, but I find it to be much more time consuming (and distracting since I can't sort the folks I follow into work vs fun folders AFAIK) than the workflow I had refined with Safari's RSS functionality. I appreciate you sharing the Vienna screen shot, since at a glance I can see it is a poor substitute for my RSS workflow in long lost Safari 5. You saved me from more wasted time and angst downloading Vienna -- thanks!

Unfortunately unless there is an easy way to downgrade to Safari 5 and recover my lost read/unread state, I have no way to capture a screen shot of my approach for you and others to see...

Also, to address your earlier concern for our social lives, I too socialize on Facebook with my 400+ family, friends and former colleagues scattered across the world. I find FB and social media useful for that, so you won't find me home on a Friday night reading RSS feeds. LOL