Where did RSS go in Safari 6???

I'm just going to throw this out there for shiggles but maybe it wasn't about money. I know, I know, hear me out. What if Apple saw a decline in RSS usage and used that as an opportunity to drop support and clean up Safari a bit. Remove a little bloat to help decrease loading times, increase efficency, etc. With the Mac App Store, there is proof there is a market for RSS clients far beyond what Apple was maybe willing to include in their browser. So they drop it opening the market up for third party developers to make a good buck and we get a slimmer browser in return.

I kind of see it as a win/win.

You have people that ***** and moan of bloat, memory usage, etc yet opitmizations can only go so far and the only true way of making something more optimized is to remove functionality that contains the least amount of user usage. Apple seems to have gone that route. I actually like how much faster and slimmer Safari has become over the last few versions. There is a very rich third-party market full of amazing clients that go above and beyond what RSS support in Safari ever did. This is their chance to shine.

..or

Maybe it was about money. Think about it. RSS support in Safari brought in 0 revenue for Apple (Google is a different story). Dropping RSS support opens up the market on OS X for the third-party RSS clients. Apple takes their 30% cut from the sales of these clients. Now they have a revenue from RSS. 😉

Message was edited by: Scyanide

AppleSean wrote:

I appreciate the conspiracy talk, of course – always good entertainment, but on the other hand, if it's all about monetization, etc. why introduce the feature (RSS support) in the first place? It's more than a bit frustrating – and a bit like hooking someone on crack then taking away the crackpipe. Moreover, the concept behind RSS is practical and ubiquitous, I don't see RSS going away in concept even if all of the readers disappeared.

But now, consider this, is Apple a trend setter or a follower. Of course there is no conspiracy, but when Apple and Google both drop RSS, guess what the web site owners are going to do when it comes time to pay to establish and maintain an RSS feed? Then when the web developers say, you know there is no way to monitize an RSS feed, no amount of "practical and ubiquitous" is going to matter.

I monitor everything that I care about via RSS and every week feeds are dropping off, or merging and becomming less informative. For example, Yahoo just cuts their RSS feed text off in mid sentance.

And to answer your other question, why introduce RSS in the first place? RSS was introduced at a time when supporting web standards was important to gain marketshare. Now that Apple has market share, they just don't need the same approach.

@neil456 i think it is highly unlikely rss tech is going anywhere anytime soon for one thing rss is how pdcasts work for another wordpress has not shyed away from rss at all and a good 20% or so of websites are built on that tech. while there are certainly sites are dropping support for the open tech rss represents there are also sites which are adding rss every day. google has dropped support for their reader app/service but they are still generating custom rss feeds for any search, also yotube channel pages still publicly advertize their rss feeds so i'd say it's a stretch to say they are dropping the tech.

i could be crazy but a lot of the people i been following on twitter have been especially quiet ever since twitter dropped support for rss. it's possible we arent alone in valuing this rss. one can always hope anyway.

I feel like 1984

This is a brain-bleeding mistake on behalf of Apple; i.e. removing RSS from Safari on OS X and Safari on iOS and remove the pub_sub_agent on Safari 5x on Lion, so feed do no longer update.

For me Safari now acts like a bookkeeping application that does little else than react to commands given by third part applications of last resort. Safari is no longer a true Web Browser; it's becoming an cripple.

I am just on the verge of going back to Snow Leopard; the last good install

I have already bought three RSS-apps in the so called AppStore, and they are total crap. The App Store is beginning to look like the "Google Gadgets mess"; which was and still is an ocean of useless rubbish. I don't have time for this eternal trial by error and spending.

I have work to do. Work! And fast!

Why is this happening? This is a war against sober computing, nothing less

Regards

Wow. It's too bad that Apple has decided annoy its users in this way. External RSS readers are pointless and redundant. You're already on the web; why needlessly bring a third party application into your workflow? This has to be the pits for journalists.

RSS is the backbone of so much, nowadays, I can't go back to the old way. Looks like Apple is forcing me and other users back to Firefox. Too bad. I was really enjoying Safari, but no RSS is an absolute deal breaker. Way to turn back the clock a decade, Apple :-(

just looked up that KB article now that they listed what its does and its all quicktime stuff no mention of the pubsub agent that pretty sneaky if true can anyone else confirm this? also has anyone tried netnewswire? it looks pretty decent as an alternative, granted its not nearly as good as being able to use rss in browser.

Thank you ubernaut for your efforts

I hereby have downgraded our Mac's back to 10.6.9 Snow Leopard, running Safari 5.1.9 as a Full-Web-Browser, blazingly faster than the Safari 6 Half-Web-Browser on Lion, Mountain Lion and iOS 6

I am now back on a more useful, more valuable and more human-interactivly-modern Personal Computing Platform than I was, when running Lion and Mt. Lion

Best regards

Gunnar

- a professional Mac-only user, since 1993.

Take that Apple!

While i cannot argue with most of what you say i do think that referring to rss in the past tense isnt right and doesn't help much. I can tell you i'll continue to use it even if it means not being able to have it the way it should be (inside Safari) or not being able to upgrade. Also i'd say we have along way to go before we are in winblows territory.

yeah i just added more myself it looks like im going to be forced to upgrde prety soon here the holes in safari 5 are starting to get bigger. You'd think we could get some kind of official apple response considering this thread has more views and replies then even the itunes podcasts thread from the 11.1 fiasco.

Stunningly, this issue has not yet been resolved for Safari 7 in Mavericks. This is unfortunate because it means that my primary machine will still be running Safari 5 and Lion until this gets resolved. A built-in RSS reader that was simple to use is the primary, and sometimes, sole reason for using Safari. I actually wouldn't mind using Safari 5 with Mavericks, but I assume that's a no-can-do sort of proposition. I wonder if anyone could build an extension that would effectively act as a built-in RSS reader, and even better if it also updated the "unread" count in the menus as with Safari 5.

I've been stuck with Safari 5 on Snow because professional sw as FCP or plug ins, didn't know that Safari 6 was missing Rss reader. Downloaded Mavericks and very, very, very disappointed of the missing feeds reader. Red the main post of this thread from last year and perfectly agree with the complaining of the ones that enough smart to make RSS their reason of life over the information age...

The ones that don't use feeds to filter articles are just ignorant , in a nice way, as they don't know how fast is to follow many point of views and many subject within a couple of minutes. As a blogger I've seen the result of feed missing because many of my viewers were obviously checking feeds instead of site.

Too bad for Apple to move away from them, if speed is an issue, surely they are cutting on efficiency that is not only about speed but on results that are much more important. Just silly nerds or gamers cares for pure speed... In fact I don't like to surf on IOS Safari because of that.

Finally I agree to ask for an extension to habilitate them again, but also to Apple to put a switch in the pref to put it back on Safari as an optional choice.

I'm also a 10.7 + Safari 5 holdout. I've been using RSS since the beginning. I shudder to think what life is like without it.

Could people who have bitten the bullet and moved to 10.8 or 10.9 post their experiences about how they are getting by? How do you keep track of updates to frequently visited websites? What is your workflow?

Michael J wrote:

Could people who have bitten the bullet and moved to 10.8 or 10.9 post their experiences about how they are getting by? How do you keep track of updates to frequently visited websites? What is your workflow?

Using a real RSS client with cool features?

it does seem as if apple wont be changing their minds on this one anytime soon especially since they are pushing safari push notifications now. Not sure why it has to be a choice wish we could have the best of both worlds.

I tell you may bad experience then!

I was playing with Mavericks last Friday and start trying and dl some rss readers.

First was nice. but after adding one link to a site, told me: " pay yo have more..." Great!

Then another one that looked worst than the ones of the 90s...

In the meantime I was dling the updates for iLife to see the changes and try iMovie, but they were gigas to dl.

So I left the App Store open and changed room while downloading, after an hour came back and iPhoto was ok but iMovie not and dl very very slow, so stopped and resumed, the Store asked me again the pwd, ok typed in.

So I decided to try and another reader while controlling the iMovie dl, but was to complicated to transfer the very well organized folder I have on my Safari 5.1 bookm bar. Left again the Mac to do a couple of calls and back, I decide to try the menu bar one so the Store asked for the pwd again, typed in.

Checked this one looked better but not as good as the one that was asking me to pay for more, so left the checking as the free ones were mainly those ones.

Yesterday I received an mail from App Store charging me for one of the reader that is not even the better one available.

I might have typed the pwd thinking that it was asking me again after a idle time, I don't know, certainly I'll never use Safari 7 made for quick heads but with less brain...

As somebody said in this thread why upgrading if it get worst? I'll leave it for the poor nerds out there...