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Browser innovation is alive and well

Here’s a feature that caught me by surprise (maybe I haven’t been keeping my ear close enough to the ground): the new Firefox 1.0 preview release supports Live Bookmarks, a novel twist on RSS aggregators where feeds look just like bookmark folders, displaying a list of bookmarks corresponding to the headlines from the feed. Best of all, the feature support RSS autodiscovery. Sites with auto-discoverable feeds display an attractive RSS icon on the right hand side of the status bar, allowing for one click subscriptions.

There are certainly some issues to be ironed out. Subscribing to a feed without auto-discovery isn’t very easy, as the “New Live Bookmark” button is missing from the bookmark manager’s toolbar (look in the File menu there instead). I also haven’t found the interface for setting subscription options such as polling intervals, so I’ll have to trust that Firefox is doing more or less the right thing. Those points aside, it’s great to see Firefox driving forward browser innovation yet again.

Update: Here’s a killer app for this feature: if you use blogmarks/b-links/del.icio.us instead of bookmarks, subscribing to the accompanying RSS feed as a live bookmark will give you access to your most recently added items within the browser UI.

Posted 14th September 2004 at 4:28 pm

This is Browser innovation is alive and well by Simon Willison, posted on 14th September 2004.

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13 comments

  1. oh, Simon :-) That's a lese-majesty, Andreesen said some time ago that there are no more browser innovations ;-)

    daniel glazman - 14th September 2004 16:52 - #

  2. I actually had Andreesen in mind when I came up with the headline :)

    Simon Willison - 14th September 2004 16:56 - #

  3. Seems to work in the same way that Omniweb 5's RSS reader does, except that I can't see how you get notifications of updated sites? Am I missing something?

    Jon Hicks - 14th September 2004 19:32 - #

  4. If you right click on the feed "folder" you can refresh the feed. I'm not sure if it automatically does it or not. One time when I "opened" the folder from the Bookmark Manager, I saw the "updating live bookmark..." message, so it may just update when you open it ... course, that could be a lot ...

    rob - 14th September 2004 19:45 - #

  5. Camino also has this feature, along with OmniWeb.

    Radley Smith - 14th September 2004 23:55 - #

  6. Well, I still don't 'get' RSS, neither these Live Bookmarks things. I just rather visit the websites myself.

    Martijn - 15th September 2004 00:06 - #

  7. I must agree with Martijn... I have no use for live makrs or RSS feeds.

    Samual - 15th September 2004 23:03 - #

  8. I removed 1.0 PR. Live bookmarks and sage don't cooperate, and I like sage better. I just don't like the way live bookmarks work. I crashed and lost my bookmarks, missed my old extensions. Reinstalled 0.9.3 and uploaded my bookmarks with the bookmark synchronizer (which was disabled in 1.0)

    Bill Creswell - 16th September 2004 12:19 - #

  9. I'd rather have my style switcher back! Also, I don't think that the feed button should be called RSS. Perhaps FEED or SUBSCRIBE would be better, and certainly not XML.

    Simon Jessey - 16th September 2004 14:48 - #

  10. Er, innovation? IE and CDF?

    Phil Wilson - 19th September 2004 00:21 - #

  11. Also, I don't think that the feed button should be called RSS. Perhaps FEED or SUBSCRIBE would be better, and certainly not XML.

    The RSS button is out now:

    RSS icon for Live Bookmarks was too geeky, too big, and looked like it said "ASS"

    ...to be replaced by a, well, a sort of emit-y looking thing.

    Jonathan Buchanan - 27th September 2004 20:45 - #

  12. The Avant Browser 10.0 also has a bookmarks for feeds and can display them directly out of XML.

    I still can't find that big of an advantage over HTML browsing of the blogs...

    Anyway, Microsoft took Andreesen too seriously. If they don't go back to the drawing board, all the other browser will slowly eat the market share. Even the ones built on top of IE like Avant...

    antao - 18th October 2004 12:21 - #

  13. Madchen, die pfeifen und Hennen (Hahnen), die krahn, soll man beizeiten den Hals herumdrehn.

    Samantha - 27th August 2006 03:59 - #

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