RSS Is a Glorified "Favorites" Feature
RSS is in Internet Explorer 7!!! The blogosphere is shouting from the rooftops. Yawn. I tried RSS in IE7, and it highlights the true shortcoming of current RSS applications — it's really not much of an improvement over "favorites" or "bookmarks."
Context & Ripple Effects
The blogosphere treated Microsoft shipping RSS inside Internet Explorer 7 as a milestone, with syndicated reviews framing the browser as a threat to both Mozilla and standalone RSS aggregators. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 dissents after trying IE7's Beta 2 implementation: reading a feed there feels like using favorites or bookmarks, not a genuine step forward.
That dissent lands on ground already broken months earlier, when panelists at the Blog Business Summit flagged industry-wide RSS usability problems after designer Molly Holzschlag couldn't find a blog's feed — evidence that subscription was inconsistent before Microsoft ever baked it into the browser.
First-order effects
- Standalone RSS aggregator vendors face a new competitive reality: their core feature ships free inside IE7, so differentiation has to come from something beyond basic subscription and reading.
- Microsoft's move puts RSS in front of mainstream IE users for the first time, exposing just how inconsistent publishers make feed discovery — the exact failure the Blog Business Summit panel documented in October 2005.
Second-order effects
- If browser-native readers are 'glorified bookmarks,' as Karp argues, aggregator developers must either add filtering, search, or workflow value above raw syndication or concede the low end of the market to Microsoft.
- Browser vendors now control how hundreds of millions of users first encounter feeds, shifting leverage over the RSS experience from toolmakers and publishers toward whoever ships the default browser.
Third-order effects
- The episode sketches a recurring pattern in which platform owners absorb a category's defining feature and reframe it as commodity plumbing, forcing independent tools up the stack — a dynamic that recurs wherever a protocol meets a dominant client.
- How the RSS-versus-Atom format debate settles matters more now that a default browser is anointing one implementation path for mass-market adoption.
The trend: Browsers are absorbing once-specialized web technologies like RSS into the default experience, turning standalone tools into premium add-ons or obsolete utilities.