Google Groups RSS

Update: Google Groups has completely removed the RSS feature, so I will have to find another way to follow Firefox releases.

Most large tech organizations nowadays are slowly allowing RSS endpoints to decay into obscurity. Today’s example is Google Groups and to some extent, the Mozilla Foundation. I like to stay up to date with the latest release notes on Mozilla Firefox, but their page does not offer any RSS option that I could find. Instead, I used their Google Group for announcements, along with this information archive on StackExchange. It seems that RSS feeds were previously available under the About page for each group. Although the links to the feeds were removed, the endpoints still worked perfectly. Recently, however, Mozilla switched to another Google Group, with a new URL scheme incompatible with the previous method to access the feeds. After a good deal of experimentation, I found the endpoint to access the new feed:

// Original Scheme
https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.announce

// RSS endpoint
https://groups.google.com/forum/feed/mozilla.announce/msgs/rss_v2_0.xml?num=10


// New Scheme
https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/announce

// RSS endpoint
https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/forum/feed/announce/msgs/rss_v2_0.xml?num=10

While it’s clear that Google has no intention to support these endpoints, I hope the Mozilla Foundation can at least advertise these URLs while they are still available.