Villa: Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it

Thanks for the links. These helped and were interesting.
However the bottom line is what Cyberax said above: I don't trust Google anymore and I'm actively flying all its services as much as I can.

Now, about your questions about "why that happened in the first place", the answer is very simple to me. Google products are extremely well done, extremely available, reliable and user friendly. And free (ok, as in beer, but the free as in speech is losing momentum and I say that as FSF member), and available to Linux users (just to stay on topic on LWN), and the list could go on...

Take GMail: it's not just a mail client: it's client and server. I've been using it daily since January 2005, for an average of 8 hours a day (granted, not staring at it for 8 hours a day, but keeping it open and using it). My account has been down only once, for only 20 minutes and it was the day and the time of the terrorist attack in London (July 2005) and of course I was in Europe.
Conversations and Labels are also big innovations simply unavailable in other clients or servers.

Sure, some people might not like (or might not care about) some Google products and/or features, but the vast majority does. And that is how *that* happened: by offering great products that the vast majority liked, available in the browser with technologies open to Linux users, for free. Really, how could have a decent competition survived?