RSS Support In Firefox 1.0 RC: Live Bookmarks!!!
Just downloaded and installed Firefox 1.0 RC. And the first thing that jumped into my eyes is the little orange RSS icon at the lower right corner[1] (Slashdot is my home page :) ):
Curious, I clicked on it. And up popped a context menu asking me "Subscribe to 'Slashdot RSS'..."
Sure! I clicked.
The familiar "Add Bookmark" dialog showed up. I selected a spot for it to live. And it showed up in my bookmarks toolbar[2], along with all the top stories.
That is really Cool!
Now, come to think about it, there is a second story here. It has to do with the UI design of this new feature. It flows so naturally that I, without any preknowledge of this new feature, figured it out within seconds without wasting one mouse click or key stroke.
Now I'm going to post this blog entry and see if it shows up in my Firefox live bookmark.
Update: It did!
Re: RSS Support In Firefox 1.0 RC: Live Bookmarks!!!
Re: RSS Support In Firefox 1.0 RC: Live Bookmarks!!!
I don't believe Firefox will compete with SharpReader (or even Bloglines) at all.
What it will do is to i) popularize the concept of RSS; ii) encourage websites to design for RSS auto-discovery; iii) make bookmarks more alive, less stale.
The feature itself feels very lightweight, can be considered an integral part of browsing and is very similar to other features already in the browser such as bookmark management and the Mozilla navigation toolbar.
I look at it as usability features such as tabbed browsing, vi style /search, and popup blocker.
Re: RSS Support In Firefox 1.0 RC: Live Bookmarks!!!
I haven't seen an interface to add a Live Bookmark other than via the RSS button that appears at the bottom right for pages with RSS meta tags.
This is annoying, since the only way to add a feed is to copy an existing Live Bookmark, then change its "Feed Location" field, which doesn't show up for regular Bookmarks.
This feature feels thrown together in response to the RSS features coming in Safari on Mac OS 10.4. Of course, anything that helps popularize RSS is fine with me.