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.
Chrome’s team argues that because only about 0.02% of page loads use XSLT, it’s not worth the maintenance burden.
Surely given the volume of browser usage, 0.02% is still a very substantial amount of usage. Lazy fucks
I’m not entirely sure what the “maintenance burden” even is on a tech that hasn’t changed in decades.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
These days you can probably vibe-code yourself the perfect RSS extension or even standalone app.
Might give it a shot actually.
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?
You will be unaffected.
