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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
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.
RSS is enabled by default on every WordPress install. That's a big part of it.
Wait, browsers still had RSS support? I thought that was deprecated a decade ago. I've been using dedicated apps for them
Vivaldi does. I assume there are chrome and Firefox plugins too.
Xslt has nothing to do with RSS being available or not.
It seems to have to do with how it looks formatting wise and not about availability or not, that is what is being meant.
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.
"Yay more JavaScript" said nobody
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.
So things like newsbreak who ingest a sites feed then display?
Should be fine. They don't have to use a browser to retrieve that feed.
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 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?
Feeder on Android. Default choice I would say.
I like miniflux. Lightweight, web based, selfhostable, assisted hosting and compatible with third party clients.
Same, minflux is simple and very lightweight. I just use a web app on my phone to read it. Still very responsive.
+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).
I use FluentReader, and an extension that restores Firefox's old RSS functionality.
Edit: The extension I use is called Livemarks
Thunderbird. It feels right at home paired with Firefox, and has extremely powerful message filtering built in.
if you want self hosted, FreshRSS is the gold standard.
FreshRSS
It's vibe coded. :(
Ugh. Is there anything that’s NOT vibe coded :/
Yeah, it's a real pity. Even Dokuwiki, which was rock solid for ages, is plagued by it.
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.
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.
XSLT is a fucking curse upon all who learned it.
it deserves to be lost and forgotten.
There are libraries that can polyfill this with almost zero effort. List should not effect any active site that offers rss feeds.
Who TF is still using XSLT?
Good riddance.
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.)
You just need literally anything else other than the native browser to do it no?
I can't guarantee an online researcher/visitor has anything other than a browser and I sure as heck don't want to walk them through installing something on whatever machine they're using. I do enough tech support as it is.
Current plan is to have the web server do it, it's just another thing on my plate that I need to figure out how to do.
XSLT can be run on the web server. The browser just receives the output HTML.
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?
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.
Sites can just use CSS.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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