I'm not entirely sure what the "maintenance burden" even is on a tech that hasn't changed in decades.

0.02% of page loads is honestly way more than I would've expected. The fact that they would look at that number and see an excuse to remove a feature like this is honestly a gigantic red flag for the way these browsers are being developed. Granted, it's not that surprising if you've been paying attention to the embrace-extend-extinguish march of web technologies towards a walled garden controlled by tech giants, but this is part of the writing on the wall, folks.

It seems to have to do with how it looks formatting wise and not about availability or not, that is what is being meant.

Vivaldi does. I assume there are chrome and Firefox plugins too.

I like miniflux. Lightweight, web based, selfhostable, assisted hosting and compatible with third party clients.

Feeder on Android. Default choice I would say.

Thunderbird. It feels right at home paired with Firefox, and has extremely powerful message filtering built in.

Got FreshRSS running on my home server and feeding a couple of client programs. RSSGuard on my computers and Readrops on my phone. No complaints, got it doing exactly what I want it to do.

I use FluentReader, and an extension that restores Firefox's old RSS functionality.

Edit: The extension I use is called Livemarks

It's not zero effort at all. For XML(which RSS is) with xlst it is serving only 2 static files. The XML file with a reference to the xlst file, and the xlst file.

The XML can be read without transformation by tools like RSS readers, but displayed with transformation into HTML for viewing in a browser with the xlst.

You're saying it is easy to polyfill, but involving JavaScript at all completely breaks the (useful) paradigm

XSLT is a fucking curse upon all who learned it.

it deserves to be lost and forgotten.

We use it at my library/archive to convert EADs (XML finding aids) into something we can present to a human.

This change breaks something that's been working for us without issue for over a decade, and it's personally a PITA because I'm the only dev-adjacent person in the library and fixing this takes me away from other stuff. (I'm spread thin and we've been in a hiring freeze for 5 years. I love my coworkers but there's so much work stuff I have to deprioritoze in order to do the important stuff, it feels unfair when a big corporation decides to break something on me.)

Should never have been in the browser anyway.

Only if you're using the Chrome extension, maybe. This is just Google trying to kill even the memory of Google Reader by fucking with the biggest competitor to social media in Chrome.

You will be unaffected.