Missing RSS Feeds in OSX? What?

One thing you won't find in Mountain Lion's Mail app—at least as it stands today—is the RSS feature. Whereas in Lion you can subscribe to an RSS feed in Mail in order to be alerted to, and to read, newly published articles from your favorite websites, that feature appears to be gone from Mail in Mountain Lion. Mail's preferences window has been stripped of the RSS pane, and there's no longer an Add RSS Feeds command in Mail's File menu.

What makes this omission especially curious is that RSS functionality also seems to be missing from Safari in Mountain Lion. It appears that if you want to read RSS feeds in Mountain Lion, you'll have to turn to a third-party app—at least, if nothing changes between now and the arrival of the final version of this OS X update in late summer.

Apple actually created their own Safari extension that replicates the now removed standard RSS option. Those who want this feed recognition back in Safari without having to revert to an earlier version, may do so by installing a Safari extension to integrate the option from Daniel and Red Sweater Software. This is only required if running Safari version 6. Other browsers on the Mac such as Firefox and Chrome do not have this issue.

The decision to remove basic RSS syndication natively was stupid; another example of how large corporation can make decisions which have a ripple effect for many users without providing backward compatibility. If you are an Apple user with Safari 6.x or higher you will need to install an extension to allow RSS reading within the browser. You may do so by installing the extension located here, (details available using this link). It will download the extension reader which you can then install into your Safari instance simply by double-clicking. There are several custom-developed applications as well, which adds the RSS functionality into the toolbar, it can be downloaded here. To learn more about it, the details are here.

There are several options available that will provide RSS support native to your desktop OSX system as well, for more information read this. I personally use NetWire, I find it to be the easiest to integrate as an application in my desktop environment and it syncs to my Google+ account.

No matter which method you elect to use, don't expect RSS syndication to make a return to Apple's OS anytime soon.