this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026

358 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

89478 readers

3366 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

358

RSS feeds are beginning to break once xslt support begins being dropped by browsers soon (justinjackson.ca)

submitted 7 months ago by confuser@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[+] Feyd@programming.dev 126 points 7 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 107 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'm not entirely sure what the "maintenance burden" even is on a tech that hasn't changed in decades.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 43 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

From the article:

Google says it's removing XSLT to address security vulnerabilities. The underlying library that processes XSLT in Chrome (libxslt) is an aging C/C++ codebase with known memory safety issues. Chrome's team argues that because only about 0.02% of page loads use XSLT, it's not worth the maintenance burden.

It's debatable whether Google, with all its resources, really needs to do this, especially given that 0.02% of all page loads is still quite a lot. But there are certainly times when it's better to just delete seldom-used old code from your project to lower the maintenance burden and reduce the surface area for attacks.

[–] 73QjabParc34Vebq@piefed.blahaj.zone 36 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Big tech has been straining the libxml2 dev who recently got annoyed with them. Instead of helping maintain the libraries they ship on billions of computers, Google is trying to reduce there use.

https://socket.dev/blog/libxml2-maintainer-ends-embargoed-vulnerability-reports

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 1 points 7 months ago

That was a good read. Very eye opening to the underpinning problems in the oss world, caused by the proprietary world. Really, we should all use a license that prohibits commercial uses of any oss code.

[–] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

0.02% of page loads is honestly way more than I would've expected. The fact that they would look at that number and see an excuse to remove a feature like this is honestly a gigantic red flag for the way these browsers are being developed. Granted, it's not that surprising if you've been paying attention to the embrace-extend-extinguish march of web technologies towards a walled garden controlled by tech giants, but this is part of the writing on the wall, folks.

[–] 418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

RSS is enabled by default on every WordPress install. That's a big part of it.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 51 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Xslt has nothing to do with RSS being available or not.

[–] confuser@lemmy.zip 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It seems to have to do with how it looks formatting wise and not about availability or not, that is what is being meant.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 34 points 7 months ago (3 children)

That's just for those few websites that use their RSS feed as their content source. If they want to keep doing that they can just get a JavaScript library that provides XSLT functionality. The feed itself is untouched.

[–] 73QjabParc34Vebq@piefed.blahaj.zone 19 points 7 months ago (2 children)

"Yay more JavaScript" said nobody

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 9 points 7 months ago

It's really hard to decide whether XSLT or JavaScript is worse. On the one hand XSLT wasn't cobbled together in a weekend. On the other it requires you to write XML and its "arrays" start at 1.

[–] Papierkorb@feddit.org 3 points 7 months ago

Would be easy to render the XSLT in the server. Could be cached nicely as well.

[–] _wizard@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So things like newsbreak who ingest a sites feed then display?

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago

Should be fine. They don't have to use a browser to retrieve that feed.

[–] confuser@lemmy.zip 2 points 7 months ago

Yep which is why the purpose of this post

[–] pirate2377@lemmy.zip 29 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wait, browsers still had RSS support? I thought that was deprecated a decade ago. I've been using dedicated apps for them

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago

Vivaldi does. I assume there are chrome and Firefox plugins too.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (10 children)

i browsed the web via RSS for a while. Maybe it's time to get back to that. at least for some food blogs or something. anyone got a good rss reader?

[–] libre_warrior@lemmy.ml 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I like miniflux. Lightweight, web based, selfhostable, assisted hosting and compatible with third party clients.

[–] USSEthernet@startrek.website 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Same, minflux is simple and very lightweight. I just use a web app on my phone to read it. Still very responsive.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 2 points 7 months ago

+1 for Miniflux, super nice and it has a polished interface.

You can also access it through third-party apps such as NewsFlash (for Linux) or NetNewsWire (for mac, you just need to enable "Google Feeds APIs" in Miniflux for that).

[–] Matth@sh.itjust.works 7 points 7 months ago

Feeder on Android. Default choice I would say.

[–] flameleaf@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

Thunderbird. It feels right at home paired with Firefox, and has extremely powerful message filtering built in.

[–] Panthenetrunner@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 months ago

Got FreshRSS running on my home server and feeding a couple of client programs. RSSGuard on my computers and Readrops on my phone. No complaints, got it doing exactly what I want it to do.

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I use FluentReader, and an extension that restores Firefox's old RSS functionality.

Edit: The extension I use is called Livemarks

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

i currently use firefox. mind sharing that extention with us please?

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago

Its called Livemarks

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm blanking on the name rn, but I'll let you know ASAP

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Commenting to follow

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

Its called Livemarks

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There are libraries that can polyfill this with almost zero effort. List should not effect any active site that offers rss feeds.

[–] JuvenoiaAgent@piefed.ca 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I remember using XSLT to make my site's RSS look good around 20 years ago. I thought it was so cool, though XSLT was awful to write.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

XSLT is a fucking curse upon all who learned it.

it deserves to be lost and forgotten.

[–] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 16 points 7 months ago

It's sad to see how browser manufacturers have been treating RSS for a while. Back in the day your Firefox would show you that a page has an RSS feed. You were able to click on it, see what was in there in human readable, not cryptic-XML style format, and you were able to subscribe to it. Then you had a nice little bookmark showing you everything this page had posted recently. RSS is a great technology and it really really sucks how Big Tech has tried to kill it.

[–] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 7 months ago (2 children)

YouTube broke my RSS feed for YouTube subscriptions by breaking how embedded videos works.

Now when I try to click on videos in my RSS feed it just gets me "Error 153" every time.

It's so frustrating!

I'm currently using Feedbro on Firefox (the add-on hasn't been updated in 2 years) but if anyone has any recommendations that don't get that error I'm all ears!

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Who TF is still using XSLT?

Good riddance.

[–] smh@slrpnk.net 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

We use it at my library/archive to convert EADs (XML finding aids) into something we can present to a human.

This change breaks something that's been working for us without issue for over a decade, and it's personally a PITA because I'm the only dev-adjacent person in the library and fixing this takes me away from other stuff. (I'm spread thin and we've been in a hiring freeze for 5 years. I love my coworkers but there's so much work stuff I have to deprioritoze in order to do the important stuff, it feels unfair when a big corporation decides to break something on me.)

[–] confuser@lemmy.zip 3 points 7 months ago

Dayum that's rough

[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You just need literally anything else other than the native browser to do it no?

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 5 points 7 months ago

Should never have been in the browser anyway.

[–] vortexal@sopuli.xyz 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'm a little confused about this. While I've been using RSS feeds for several years, my only experience with RSS feeds is with Inoreader. Will this cause issues with the way that I've been using RSS feeds or will I be unaffected?

[–] knightly@pawb.social 7 points 7 months ago

Only if you're using the Chrome extension, maybe. This is just Google trying to kill even the memory of Google Reader by fucking with the biggest competitor to social media in Chrome.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 points 7 months ago

You will be unaffected.

load more comments