from Hacker News

We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution

by Flenser on 12/11/23, 9:26 AM with 241 comments

  • by listmaking on 12/11/23, 2:01 PM

    This is hilarious big-company shit, that engineer on Chrome devrel team finds it easier to actually just write his own unofficial RSS feed-generator and make it public [1] — the feed for this blog is at [2] — than for the "Internal issues have been filed with the DevSite team" to get worked on [3]. And who knows when this will rise to a priority for that team?

    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

  • by kinlan on 12/11/23, 1:41 PM

    Hey all, I lead the team that runs this site.

    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

  • by smusamashah on 12/11/23, 1:23 PM

    When chrome started taking over, all other major browsers (probably even internet explorer) had native RSS read support (read at least). They use to show rss icon in the url bar or some other indictor that this site has RSS available. But Chrome ever since has been throwing raw xml at you when you try to open an rss feed link and never indicates if there is RSS here. I believe this to be the main reason for decline of RSS.

  • by hliyan on 12/11/23, 12:50 PM

    The web seems to be becoming paradoxically less and less machine/automation friendly. I recently had to modify 150+ accounts in a Google Workspace. Twenty years ago, I would be doing this in a Unix environment with a very simple shell script. Instead, I had to click-copy-paste-click, 20 times per page, like a monkey. I'm sure there must be some sort of API, but it would have taken 100 times the time it would have taken to write a simple command line script. In the quest for more and more human eyeballs, the web is becoming less and less machine friendly.

  • by hennell on 12/11/23, 12:37 PM

    I feel pleased that me as a single web dev with minimal money and few smarts, has managed to successfully implement rss on all blogs or blog like things I've made.

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

  • by bhaak on 12/11/23, 11:46 AM

    > If you've ended up here, chances are you're looking to subscribe to our blog in your RSS feed.

    > 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?

  • by eviks on 12/11/23, 12:25 PM

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

    RSS could be that solution!

  • by pentagrama on 12/11/23, 1:56 PM

    I noticed the same for Google's site https://web.dev/

    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).

  • by mogoh on 12/11/23, 1:18 PM

    Bramus, a google engineer did an inoffical workaround:

    https://mastodon.social/@bramus@front-end.social/11144816695...

  • by reddalo on 12/11/23, 12:09 PM

    People don't understand how much RSS is useful...

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

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 12/11/23, 10:36 PM

    Solution found.

       curl -sA "" https://developer.chrome.com/blog/sitemap.xml \
   |sed -n '
   1i\
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>\
   <rss version="2.0">\
   <channel>
   s}\(<loc>\)\(.*\)\(</loc>\)}\
   <item>\
   <title>\2</title>\
   <description>\2</description>\
   <link>\2</link>\
   </item>}p;
   $a\
   </channel>\
   </rss>
   '
    If this isn't correct RSS, please forgive me. I'm not an "engineer". I prefer a personalised, simple HTML made from URLs as opposed to XML. I write filters to generate this in C.

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

  • by padjo on 12/11/23, 12:45 PM

    “Unfortunately” - c’mon it wasn’t an act of God that removed them

  • by ChrisArchitect on 12/11/23, 4:22 PM

    Related RSS talk today:

    Please, Expose Your RSS

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

  • by svat on 12/11/23, 1:08 PM

    "Removed" implies it was there at some point; is this true? Or has this blog just never had RSS support? (I searched for this blog in Feedly and it didn't show up any older feed, but that may not be a reliable method for checking?)

  • by LeoNatan25 on 12/11/23, 12:46 PM

    They are “actively working on a solution”, because it requires a Google-sized brain and 28477382 work hours to maintain an RSS feed of a blog. What a silly company.

  • by jrm4 on 12/11/23, 3:26 PM

    Broadly, the entire tech community should be embarrassed about the extent to which they actually collectively "believed" Google's stated purpose for killing Google Reader; if we had effectively called out that utter BS a while ago, I genuinely believe the entire web would be a better place today.

  • by DeathArrow on 12/11/23, 12:14 PM

    Why don't we use Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera and so on?

  • by jug on 12/11/23, 12:35 PM

    I tried using RSS Generators like https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ and even a graphical one, but it looks like this isn't a static site but there's some sort of delayed fetch of the posts that messes them up. Regardless how much I tried, I could only get it to fetch the top nav bar. I don't really think first of intentional malice to spite everyone else too, but maybe this is the same reason their own RSS feed generator no longer works either.

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

  • by prartichoke on 12/11/23, 12:11 PM

    I have the feeling they're currently in the final stages of development for an alternative and want to remove RSS from all their stuff right now to preemptively avoid people lamenting its sudden removal then.

  • by rado on 12/11/23, 11:47 AM

    Found this HN post via RSS...

  • by tech234a on 12/11/23, 8:53 PM

    It's worth noting that this new site replaces one that was just 3 years old, released in December 2020, here's the announcement of that version of the site: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/welcome

    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.

  • by kjeksfjes on 12/11/23, 1:20 PM

    Cue...

    - 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

  • by renegat0x0 on 12/11/23, 12:51 PM

    I think this site, is not well scrap-able without selenium. Google products however rely on web scraping because of Google search. It is a hypocrisy of sorts.

  • by squarefoot on 12/11/23, 1:02 PM

    Let me guess... so users are forced to load a web page which will show them ads that couldn't fit into RSS records?

  • by zlg_codes on 12/11/23, 1:45 PM

    Google, you helped kill widespread RSS adoption to begin with. You can't be trusted with anything technology.

  • by InCityDreams on 12/11/23, 12:52 PM

    'Google has stopped...', or 'Google no longer...', 'Google have removed'.

    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?

  • by rs_rs_rs_rs_rs on 12/11/23, 12:47 PM

    Not sure if it counts as dev blog but https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ still has RSS and Atom feeds, I guess not everything got nuked.

  • by surprisetalk on 12/11/23, 12:58 PM

  • by macinjosh on 12/11/23, 1:37 PM

    To be fair, HN doesn't offer RSS either. We need it!

  • by HunOL on 12/11/23, 12:46 PM

    I think this thread could good place to share services (self-hosted or paid) that allow to monitor site for changes and make rss/send notification.

  • by Nekorosu on 12/11/23, 1:00 PM

    Google's fight against open technologies continues.

  • by jwr on 12/11/23, 12:31 PM

    RSS is not aligned with Google's business goals.

  • by pacifika on 12/11/23, 12:31 PM

    Guess they don’t want people to read their pages.

  • by PeterZaitsev on 12/11/23, 4:36 PM

    It makes sense. After killing Google Reader making RSS less relevant helps to justify that as the right decision :)

  • by rabbits_2002 on 12/12/23, 12:01 AM

    Google is a joke how does something like this even happen

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

  • by prartichoke on 12/11/23, 12:18 PM

    Watch them slowly remove every RSS feed they operate, so when they come up with their own proprietary solution in 6 months nobody can lament their "sudden" removal of RSS.

  • by fredgrott on 12/11/23, 12:28 PM

    *-in-cheek-on

    Google management too busy doing evil

  • by bitcharmer on 12/11/23, 12:51 PM

    There's a ton of smart people working at Google. Just none in the management

  • by jacquesm on 12/11/23, 2:56 PM

    Maybe they can find the code for reader somewhere on a backup disk?

  • by gsky on 12/11/23, 12:58 PM

    The real crime is using Google tools/libraries

  • by butz on 12/11/23, 4:38 PM

    Wasn't Google planing to add some sort of RSS support in Chrome? Or did the experiment end as a failure?

  • by kenniskrag on 12/11/23, 1:03 PM

    which rss reader do you use?

  • by ppetty on 12/11/23, 11:23 PM

    Bard solvable?

  • by cyanydeez on 12/11/23, 4:31 PM

    what year is it

  • by sertbdfgbnfgsd on 12/11/23, 11:59 AM

    Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.

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

  • by throwuxiytayq on 12/11/23, 11:56 AM

    It's too much work and effort to maintain such complicated legacy technology for the incredibly busy brain of a Google engineer.

  • by vishnuharidas on 12/11/23, 12:49 PM

    RSS reader software won't be successful. RSS reader should be built into the browser and every time you open the browser, the RSS feed should be the landing page. Every time you open a new tab, it should show a minimal feed that can be fully expanded.

  • by omneity on 12/11/23, 12:44 PM

    If keeping up with Google dev blogs is important to you, at Monitoro[0] we support alerts even if the website doesn't offer RSS. You can also catch specific updates, for example if a new post mentions a Google tool you're using at work.

    Feel free to get in touch with me if you need help or have questions.

    [0]: https://monitoro.co

  • by xorcist on 12/11/23, 1:17 PM

    RSS requires a lot of developer resources to work with.

    AdSense, for example, is super hard to fit into RSS. How do you do it?

    Sorry, we tried everything but the user agent support for Javascript in RSS is simply lacking. Unfortunately, it has to be dropped, there is no alternative.