Gavin, 15 July 04
Mozilla Firefox approaches its 1.0 release and should really be concentrating on tidying up and bug fixing. Yet word has it (and you can see it too by grabbing a release hot of the presses1) that there are a number of goodies still in development. Probably worth delaying the 1.0 a little to get these new innovations perfect in light of the fact that the SP2 release of IE has pop-up blocking – so that particular advantage of the Mozilla family is weakened.
Some might say that adding an RSS reader into Firefox goes against the grain of the original intention to reduce bloat and have everything that is not an essential core browser component as an extension. Yet RSS readers are the new ‘Hello World’ and it seems the Firefox developers didn’t want to be left out.
Livemarks allow you to subscribe to RSS content from within the browser integrated with the bookmark system. Instead of a folder of static bookmarks though – the latest feed is presented in the folder of a Livemark.
I have used various RSS readers but actually having them in the browser or mail app2 is a nice hassle free way of accessing the links. No fancy reader capabilities but it makes checking for new posts via an RSS feed as simple as making a bookmark. Brings XML to the masses without anyone needing to know what the hell it’s all about. I like it. Still, this and a few other innovations make me think theres still so much new stuff that is close enough to ready that we’ll be seeing a few more point releases before 1.0
1The ‘nightly builds’ linked to are really testing builds and shouldn’t be used as a main browser. So some things here might never make it into a final release. And importantly some bugs will show up in these test builds and be sorted before making into anything classed as production quality. The main page to get firefox working builds is here
2There are some nice extensions to mozilla browsers that act as fairly complete rss readers – but current thinking seems to lead to the mail app becoming the main way of organising and reading syndicated content.
