How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds

A new article from Open RSS, the nonprofit behind the openrss.org feed service, argues that RSS feeds are still alive and widely used, but that their adoption has been damaged by a handful of large technology companies — Google above all. The organisation describes a long record of products that were built around the open RSS protocol and then dropped support for it once users were locked in.

From the browser button to FeedBurner

Early versions of Chromium, the codebase behind Chrome, shipped with RSS integration: a button appeared in the address bar whenever a site offered a feed, letting users subscribe in one click. The button later disappeared without notice and without explanation. In 2007 Google acquired FeedBurner, a service that replaced ordinary feeds with Google-owned versions carrying ads, affiliate links and tracking such as read counts and subscriber numbers. Google shut down FeedBurner's APIs in October 2012, cutting off third-party integrations, and in July 2022 removed most of the remaining services, including email subscriptions, leaving many subscribers with dead feed URLs.

Reader, Alerts and the Chrome extension

Google Reader launched in 2005 and became a popular web-based RSS reader; Google shut it down in July 2013, saying that "while the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined." An engineer who worked on the project later told The Verge that "it felt like the entire time I was on the project, various people were trying to kill it." Google Alerts gained RSS delivery in October 2008, lost it in July 2013 in favour of email only, and restored it after user backlash. A Chrome RSS extension was removed in 2013, then reinstated within a week — Google said the removal had been a mistake.

News, and why it matters

Google News, launched in 2002, deprecated its RSS support on 1 December 2017 and shut the feature down entirely that December, again without a public reason. Open RSS also notes that in May 2021 Google announced an experiment to bring RSS support back to Chrome, with no word of an official launch since. The group describes the pattern as a form of "embrace, extend and extinguish" and argues that repeatedly adding and removing RSS features undermines user confidence in the protocol, which it calls a vital part of the open web.