So imagine my surprise when I read this on Metafilter. Mozilla is killing their browser support for automatic RSS feed discovery. Because, ostensibly, people don’t use RSS.

Hrm.

I would complain but I no longer use Mozilla browsers and the browser I use doesn’t support auto-discovery either. Which is sad. On the other hand, I already have more incoming RSS traffic than I can conceivably manage. Combining it with email has the benefit of helping me scan news more quickly but the drawback of making inbox management daunting.

So I’d say that RSS isn’t really dead. I’d agree with the article that there are better ways of integrating RSS with standard browser behavior. I also agree that the browser doesn’t make the best RSS client. I would argue, however, that the browser is the best way to auto-discover RSS and that pulling this feature is kind of short-sighted given that there isn’t really a hue and cry to disappear that little orange button from the location bar.

I found myself cheering while reading this article. Can you believe there’s going to be semantic support for abstract page elements? How awesome is that? It just makes sense, no?

And then I got to the end of the article where the timeline puts HTML5 for the public somewhere near 2017 at the earliest. And then I cried.

Why can’t we have nice things?

I’m not exactly sure. Still, the Hyperwords project is fascinating to me. It’s a Firefox extension that basically shortcuts a wide variety of search engines and other knowledge expansion tools. It also lets you work with the page or pages open in your browser in myriad ways. I have really only just started playing with it but have had some fun with it so far. See for yourself by watching the introductory video.

I can say that it dramatically reworks your context menu. This currently frustrates me but I’m willing to see if the frustration dissipates in the long term as the functionality proves its mettle.