1375687 - Add "Subscribe" to page actions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Ralf Jung]

Subscribing to an RSS feed with Firefox has become pretty much undiscoverable:  I have to press Alt, then go to "Bookmarks - Subcribe"; the menu item doesn't even have the typical RSS icon, so it's easy to miss even if one checks this menu -- and I would never have looked there, as I assumed everything was also available via the Hamburger menu.

With Firefox now having a "Page actions" menu, that seems like a natural place to put a "Subscribe" button.  That would also make it much more discoverable.

Comment 1

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

Hi Gijs, let me know if you believe this bug should be added to our MVP backlog as the team won't be having triage meetings next week.  Thanks.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

It can go in the reserve for now.

Comment 4

[Antoine Turmel [:GeekShadow]]

Great news :) It was a huge drawback from Australis, and bug 647948 was filed before.

Comment 5

[Pierre de La Morinerie]

Attachment: Part 1: add "Subscribe" page action (single feed)

I care a bit about RSS, so I started working on a patch for this. :ntim I saw you were assigned on this bug: if you already started working on this, or plan to do it yourself at some point, feel free to discard this patch, and sorry for the disruption :)

This change is intended to be implemented in two parts (to make the review easier):

- Part 1: Add a "Subscribe to This Page" item to the page actions. The item can be displayed in the URL bar. When the page doesn't have discoverable feeds the menu item and the urlbar button are disabled. When the page has one feed, clicking on the item or button open the feeds page. When the page has more than one feed, the first feed is opened.

- Part 2: When the page has more than one feed, add an submenu to the "Subscribe to This Page" item, and display the multiple fields.

For now Part 1 is implemented, tested and reviewable. It is fine with you—or would you prefer a single patch including both parts?

Comment 6

[Pierre de La Morinerie]

Attachment: Screenshot of the menu item

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Hrmpf, I meant to comment here earlier, sorry - PTO and various other things got in the way.

I don't believe that we want to keep this UI in Firefox at all. If an add-on wants to provide it, that's fine, but RSS support in Firefox has been unloved for many years, and some of the underlying code is... half-dead, to put it politely. There are multiple serious bugs that have gone unnoticed and unfixed, based on my anecdotal evidence it's almost completely unused, and when we looked at telemetry for bug 1345546 that implied similar things (though I don't know if we have comprehensive full data for all uses of feeds, also live bookmarks etc.). That's besides all the awful security shenanigans it's caused over the years.

If we're genuinely going to do this, then yes we would need to cope with multiple feeds, and we should remove the entrypoint in the bookmarks toolbar button, and move/update the relevant code, rather than duplicate it (it might not want to stay in the file it's in right now, I'm not sure off-hand).

Stephen/Dolske, who owns making a decision here, before people spend more of their time on something that we might not want to take at all?

Comment 8

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Comment on attachment 8904575 [details] [diff] [review]
Part 1: add "Subscribe" page action (single feed)

Review of attachment 8904575 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

> I care a bit about RSS, so I started working on a patch for this. :ntim I saw you were assigned on this bug: if you already started working on this, or plan to do it yourself at some point, feel free to discard this patch, and sorry for the disruption :)

I've actually started working on this, I have a subview working locally. The only thing I'm missing is to make the button act like a normal button when there's 1 feed, and make the button act like a subview when there's more than 1. I haven't worked on the tests though, so thanks for that!

As Gijs says, there's some uncertainty about this feature.

::: browser/base/content/browser-feeds.js
@@ +261,5 @@
> +    if (feedUrlbarButton) {
> +      if (haveFeeds) {
> +        feedUrlbarButton.removeAttribute("disabled");
> +      } else {
> +        feedUrlbarButton.setAttribute("disabled", "true");

There's a more general fix I'm planning to work on in bug 1392733.

(This affects send to device, report site issue, etc).

::: browser/base/content/browser-pageActions.js
@@ +763,5 @@
> +
> +  onCommand(event, buttonNode) {
> +    BrowserPageActions.panelNode.hidePopup();
> +    let feeds = gBrowser.selectedBrowser.feeds;
> +    if (feeds && feeds.length > 0) {

Not sure the command can be triggered when the button is disabled.

Comment 9

[Pierre de La Morinerie]

Thanks Tim ; glad to see this is being worked on. Feel free to reuse the tests if they can be useful. And let me know if there is some code, testing or polishing I can do on this.

As for the feature in general, I'm obviously biased toward RSS support :) That said, telemetry reports indicating a low usage of the "Subscribe" feature don't surprise me much, as this feature is rather undiscoverable since the "Subscribe" button was moved out of the default toolbar a few years ago. I'd be curious to see the usage statistics of a more discoverable "Subscribe" button in the page actions.

Also syndication support seem well-aligned with Mozilla mission of promoting a more open and inter-connected web. (although of course there may be better ways to promote syndication than the "Subscribe" feature in its current state).

Comment 10

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

(In reply to :Gijs from comment #7)

> Stephen/Dolske, who owns making a decision here, before people spend more of
> their time on something that we might not want to take at all?

This is an area that we don't want to be focusing on right now -- especially on the eve of a Beta uplift, for something that sounds like it needs more work and isn't a core focus of what we're trying to do for 57. The risk/reward ration isn't great.

Even post-57, I think this would be a better fit for add-ons to handle. At best it's not clear to me that we would want to focus further efforts on RSS given other priorities.

Comment 11

[Michal Stanke (Mozilla.cz) [:mstanke][:MikkCZ]]

Here is my attempt to do so https://github.com/MikkCZ/page-action-rss. It's a fork of https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/bmjffnfcokiodbeiamclanljnaheeoke. The version for Firefox is in 'firefox-fix' branch now.

Comment 13

[Antoine Turmel [:GeekShadow]]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #10)
> (In reply to :Gijs from comment #7)
> 
> > Stephen/Dolske, who owns making a decision here, before people spend more of
> > their time on something that we might not want to take at all?
> 
> This is an area that we don't want to be focusing on right now -- especially
> on the eve of a Beta uplift, for something that sounds like it needs more
> work and isn't a core focus of what we're trying to do for 57. The
> risk/reward ration isn't great.
> 
> Even post-57, I think this would be a better fit for add-ons to handle. At
> best it's not clear to me that we would want to focus further efforts on RSS
> given other priorities.

Why not keeping this bug opened for post-57 ? RSS is an important standard IMHO and it would be easily discoverable in page action...

Comment 14

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #10)
> Even post-57, I think this would be a better fit for add-ons to handle.

Glad to see that someone has already made one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/