Waterfox 6.7.5 Adds a Built-in Feed Reader
53 points by chai
53 points by chai
This means they brought it back. Firefox used to have RSS support, untill Mozilla removed it in another of those inexcusably bad decisions.
Yep, you had "live bookmarks"; if you bookmarked a site that had an RSS feed, the feed items would show up as items in a submenu.
Browser-integrated RSS is one of the "desperate last bullet" to improve things in the web. However, I think nowadays we live in a world where most people have multiple devices, so IMHO besides browser-integrated OOB feed readers, we need those to have some synchronization capabilities. I started writing the idea here, but as I've been obsessing over this lately, I decided to write something.
Also I was going to comment about how the Gemini protocol has a fascinating take on feeds, but I also write that frequently, so I wrote another thing.
Live Bookmarks is the same thing they've (re)added here. Sadly it seems like syncing right now doesn't work with Live Bookmarks via Firefox Sync, as it just syncs them over as empty folders. I'm curious if they'll be able to fully implement sync on it in the coming releases.
That said, they've implemented a reader view on top of it, which I'm a fan of.
WebDAV is a standard storage interface like you want, but it's pretty crufty and people don't like using it. I'm pretty sure some Firefox extensions are able to sync their data or at least their settings through the Firefox Sync mechanism, but read/unread and starred article lists for a feed reader might be too much.
WebDAV is a standard storage interface like you want, but it's pretty crufty and people don't like using it.
Yes, but IIRC it delegates authentication to the web server, and I don't think there really are any implementations to share specific folders to a specific application.
I'm pretty sure some Firefox extensions are able to sync their data or at least their settings through the Firefox Sync mechanism, but read/unread and starred article lists for a feed reader might be too much.
Heh, Firefox Sync is great. Except that even my tiny 27.4kb NoScript configuration can't be synchronized over it. It actually works automatically for all extensions, by the way. It's pretty neat, but it covers very few use cases and the stringent storage limitations make it even of narrower use.
And Firefox Sync is the perfect example where my proposal would help. Mozilla could opt not to provide a service, and just allow people to synchronize their data over whatever cloud storage they wanted. (They could even provide very limited cloud storage themselves.)
edit: rclone serve s3 would be an interesting chunk of a way to implement this. However, unfortunately rclone seems to be headed in a direction I'm not a huge fan of :(
If (hypothetical) you are living in the Darwin land, NetNewsWire is able to synchronise everything on top of iCloud, with E2EE. It's also possible to use miniflux as the backend.
Sort of. Live Bookmarks weren’t nearly as pleasant to use with a lot of subscriptions as the Google Reader style UI that has been near-universally adopted by feed readers since.
Today I learned about Waterfox
It's been my main browser for over a year at this point. I tried out Zen and Librewolf before it, but Waterfox has felt the best to me.
Why did you choose it over FireFox, aside from "no telemetry"?
I used Firefox in the past. Ultimately, I think it was more a desire to try out something new than choosing it over Firefox.
I did also spend some time using some of the other alternatives. I know I had a colleague introduce me to Zen, which seemed promising, but I ran into some rough edges at the time that led me to switch, plus somehow ended up with my browser in a bad enough state I had to reinstall. Librewolf's privacy settings were a bit too uncompromising for me. Namely, their canvas fingerprinting protection broke web-based maps for me, and I didn't realize they had time-zone randomization on, which caused some scheduling nightmares.
I think Waterfox also had tree-style vertical tabs around the time I switched, which was enticing rather than continuing to use Sidebery.
Waterfox has been my default Linux browser since Firefox 57, 9 years ago. That was the first "Firefox Quantum" release, which broke XUL extensions. I had about 32 and afterwards only 3 worked, and they were the least important.
Waterfox kept XUL for years, so I switched. I installed the Classic Extensions Archive and they all started working again, so I had vertical tabs, merged with a vertical bookmarks bar, automatically synched and deduplicated with Xmarks, parallel multithreaded downloads with resumption of failed downloads, and loads more besides.
Eventually, Webextensions caught up, and Waterfox moved to the bases of Firefox ESR. The old pre-Electron one became Waterfox Classic, and was maintained until 2022.
Waterfox works with global menu bars, as in Unity, Xfce, and KDE. It has built-in adblocking, built-in vertical tab bars a year or more before Firefox, it does no telemetry so it was immune to the Foxstuck outage, and it updates less often than Mozilla's hectic biweekly schedule.
I have recommended it before:
https://lobste.rs/s/yyxyjy/15_years_forking_waterfox#c_llbl9a
Thank you for sharing your experience. I went through a "I need a decent browser" phase and wanted to move from firefox, but I'm using Firefox to write this message and I guess that says it all. Of course firefox is great and all, but I find it behaves more and more like these Sillicon valley companies, with lots of popups, even ads and huge pushes for me to use AI here and there.
I can't remember why I decided against Waterfox. One of my concerns is my ability to keep it updated. I'm not one for strong discipline in keeping AUR packages updated, and there are no official waterfox packages for Arch. To top things off, AUR packages are compromised on and off, so there's no way to automate that without automating getting pwned :P
Firefox at least gets updated whenever I pacman -Syu, although each update brings new nonsense, like these new rounded tabs that look so bad you'd think I designed them myself!
Congrats to the Waterfox team. I still feel that blogging and feed readers should be an integral part of the web experience. The Web should be a two-way conversation imo. It is quite refreshing to see a browser embracing that.
For those that liked this but are still with Firefox, I make a feed reader called BlogCat that is a webextension. It adds all that and more. It should work with Waterfox as well but I haven't tried yet.