Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog know that I am a supporter of RSS feeds. I subscribe to my own feeds using Microsoft Office Outlook, in other words I use Outlook as my feed aggregator. New posts come in looking like emails:
Microsoft Outlook RSS Subscriptions. Screen shot by Jonathan Sternfeld.
Because of this, I do not usually use the RSS feed links in the right navigation bar of the Harvey Mercheum website. Imagine my dismay when I did click one of the links recently, and instead of seeing the feed, I got a file open dialog:
My immediate fear was that somehow the website had gotten hacked, and the hackers were trying to use the RSS feed to download malicious content. Further research revealed that Mozilla had discontinued Firefox’s built-in support for what they refer to as “web feeds” back in December of 2018! Boy did I feel silly!
After reading the rest of that article, I decided to install the Brief extention in Firefox. Clicking the RSS feed link now shows the feed again:
I am sorry for any inconvenience this caused, and hope this post provided useful advice. Also note that the Mercheum Blog is available on the Feedly aggregator if you do not want to install Brief or do not use Firefox or Outlook.
