On 13/03/2018 15:26, gdk...@gmail.com wrote:
Hello dear Firefox development community!
As a fond user of the "subscribe to this page" button I sadly acknowledge to
see the deprecation of navigator.registerContentHandler().
I'm not here to grouse about it, but rather inquire about any plans to have a
user-friendly possibility for adding content handlers (other than editing
about:config).
Being stuck with "live bookmarks" and "my yahoo" as a default may be enough for
some users, but I'd rather use my own.
Unfortunately, our web feed implementation is pretty unused. We've
suspected this for a while, started gathering usage data through
telemetry to evaluate its future, and so far the data paints a pretty
bleak picture.
This ties in with other trends; e.g.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss and the fact
that of the approximately 750-odd bugs in the relevant bugzilla
component, more than half were filed more than 10 years ago (and that's
not because bugfiling in BMO slowed down, the opposite happened; or
because there are no serious bugs in the feed reader - parts of it have
been broken for a year or two now after the switch to e10s).
I'm in the process of writing up a plan for how to proceed, but at this
stage I would be lying if I didn't say that the most likely course of
action is going to be to stop shipping feed support as part of Firefox,
and to suggest people use add-ons instead. Webextensions can fill this
gap pretty well with existing APIs, as they can detect and handle feed
requests appropriately. If you knew about
navigator.registerContentHandler and JS generally, it's likely you could
write yourself a webextension that fits your needs relatively quickly.
It'd basically boil down to looking for the feed mimetypes in response
headers and forwarding the load to the webservice of your choice.
A mechanism I'd like to propose:
The pull-down for the subscription page already allows to choose an application
on the client's file system; could we supply another entry to add a web
application?
I'd appreciate that!
As you may have guessed from the preceding paragraphs, it's unlikely we
will add new features to this page.
In general, I find the current state of the "subscribe" page lacking quite some
explanations. For example, if I select a local application for feed subscription what
arguments will be passed?
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/content/browser-feeds.js#364
we pass a `feed:`-prefixed copy of the feed URI, potentially through the
OS's "handle this URI" mechanism, or as a plain cmdline argument -
nothing else.
At least a link for further reading would help immensely, adding a "what is
this?" to the page for some context about Web-Feeds could be quite helpful as well.
Users without prior knowledge about Web-Feeds might benefit from it, especially
when they explore Firefox's customization features.
There is already an introduction on first use when previewing a feed
with the builtin UI, which goes away afterwards which would be why you
aren't seeing it anymore. In en-US, it says:
This is a “feed” of frequently changing content on this site.
You can subscribe to this feed to receive updates when this content changes.
Also, could we maybe include these content handlers in the data synced with
Firefox Accounts? It's rather discomforting to add the three lines of
properties to about:config manually to every profile I create.
Again, this is unlikely to be implemented in Firefox, though you can do
it yourself by setting the `sync` preferences for those preferences in
about:config, too:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Firefox_Sync/Syncing_custom_preferences
I don't know if this works without the preferences being present on the
new client (otherwise I guess you're now just setting 6 things instead
of 3 in about:config and that obviously wouldn't be much help).
Sorry this isn't better news.
Gijs
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