The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

« A Journey Through Feed Handling | Main | The "Joy" of XUL? »

May 2, 2006

New Feed Handling Feature for Testing

We have just enabled an experimental Feed Handling feature, which will be available in nightly builds starting Friday May 5 2006. When you click on links to RSS or Atom feeds, you will be shown a preview page that lets you subscribe to the feed using your favorite reader. The idea for Firefox 2 is to also make web readers available as options. We are allowing web sites to register as Feed Readers using a method exposed on window.navigator. As this is not yet implemented, for Firefox 2 alpha 2 we are offering users the ability to customize this through about:config, and we have also seeded the list with a few providers.

To edit your web feed readers, go to about:config and type in browser.contentHandlers.

The preferences work like this:

browser.contentHandlers.#.type	The mime type of the content, must be application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
browser.contentHandlers.#.uri	The RESTy subscribe URI of the service, with a %s where the URI of the feed should be inserted.
browser.contentHandlers.#.title	The title of the service

In each of the examples, # is the next number in the sequence after the last registered set.

Once you have created these preferences for your favorite web service, it will show up as an option in the Feed Reader selection UI.

You can also subscribe with a client application or continue to use Live Bookmarks. To test the feature click on links to RSS/Atom content in web pages, or click the Subscribe icon in the Location Bar when it appears. To change your settings after you've made them, go to Tools, Options, General and click on Choose Feed Reader.

And finally, here's a screenshot:

This is a work in progress, not all of the functionality works yet but it was a solid enough improvement over the status quo (where clicking links that are feeds shows garbage) that we thought it was a good idea to get it out there. File bugs in the RSS Discovery & Preview component in the Firefox product in bugzilla.

See my previous post on feed handling for more information about how this was implemented.

Posted by ben at May 2, 2006 4:18 PM

Comments

Great! I'm so excited about 2.0. "Windows Explorer" won't know what hit them

Posted by: sam at May 4, 2006 5:23 PM

Shouldn't those prefs be browser.contentHandlers.#.type, browser.contentHandlers.#.uri, and browser.contentHandlers.#.title (based on what was checked in to firefox.js)?

Posted by: Unarmed at May 4, 2006 5:41 PM

...I should check my own posts for typos. I meant, of course, browser.contentHandlers.types.#.type, browser.contentHandlers.types.#.uri, and browser.contentHandlers.types.#.title.

Posted by: Unarmed at May 4, 2006 5:43 PM

Thanks, I wrote this post several days ago before I changed the pref format and forgot to update it!

Posted by: Ben at May 4, 2006 6:03 PM

Will it be easy enough for extensions to hook into this? Eg Use Wizz RSS Reader, or Use Sage or what have you.

Also, can you just set it to default so it doesn't pop up every time? I hope so :)

Looks great by the way :)

Posted by: Cameron at May 4, 2006 6:18 PM

You will be able to have it auto-subscribe yes.

The page is HTML, not XUL, so it will be difficult for extensions to overlay the page directly, HOWEVER extensions can override the HTML file with their own one using chrome.manifest and implement whatever different UI they want on top of it.

Posted by: Ben at May 4, 2006 6:23 PM

There is an extension called livelines has done it already, and it works great for me.

Posted by: Eric at May 4, 2006 7:12 PM

This is impressive.

A week ago something happened...I took a look at the feed links that WordPress provides at the footer of my blog (which I never did), and found out that it utilizes the feed: pseudo-protocol.
A few thoughts ran through. First, I was like, "OK, it's intended for newsreaders that register themselves to the feed: protocol," then, I was like, "but wait, I don't use newsreaders, it would be nice for Firefox to handle it automatically." Then, my third thought came: "hey, why not let the user choose the default action? The user can choose to let Firefox handle it, or the user can decide to let Firefox pass it on to whatever newsreader registered for the feed: protocol."

However, the new (experimental) feature went one step further by having an option of subscribing to a website (Netvibes in this example).
Coincidently, I'm a frequent user of Netvibes :)

Posted by: kourge at May 4, 2006 7:40 PM

Ben, have you thought about adding descriptions to what each option is, maybe a MacOSX like transition where the selected item grows and displays a description.

I know if my mom, dad, girlfriend or sister (and she's an engineer) wouldn't know what live bookmarks is or why you would use a "Web Site".

Just a though to make it user friendly.

Posted by: Jed at May 4, 2006 8:20 PM

Take a look at Safari. That is how feedhandling should be.

Posted by: vulture at May 5, 2006 12:37 AM

I'm looking for a way to add easily feeds to netvibes for long time! thank you! great idea!

Posted by: Woland at May 5, 2006 1:15 AM

That's great news. However, I would caution you against doing away entirely with the way Firefox handles feeds through the built in RSS (it should remain an option) because they are extremely convenient to use, as opposed to that instituted by both Netscape and IE7 that open a brand new page with feeds or load them in the same window. One of the beauties of RSS,particularly as it relates to Firefox, is the fact that it gives them to you in a drop down menu which allows you to select the feed title you want and to open it in a new tab, allowing you to continue to work while it loads.

Posted by: nykrindc at May 5, 2006 6:40 AM

Wow, sounds cool!

Posted by: Devdive at May 5, 2006 9:12 AM

Magic!

Posted by: Sterling Camden at May 5, 2006 9:24 AM

Hey, I like the concept! And I really like that this issue is being addressed because LiveBookmarks have been rather useless so far in my opinion.

As a die-hard Sage user, I want to echo someone else's question about whether this feature will support extensions that handle RSS/Atom. Probably not much of an issue with Sage since it's already very easy to add feeds whether they have little orange buttons or not. But it might help some really novice users to start using Sage for their XML feeding needs...

Posted by: Patrick Lee at May 5, 2006 11:28 AM

Is this supposed to work on trunk builds 3.0a1 nightly's? I see the 'seed' readers, but clicking on the RSS Icon only results in nothing, except that the RSS Icon disappears.

The selection list is collapsed and even the seeds don't show up in the list.. ???

Are there any readers that even work with Trunks at the moment?

Looks like another Places... busted before it starts...

Posted by: Usaywhat at May 5, 2006 7:04 PM

©1997-2006 Ben Goodger. All Rights Reserved.
Opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of any organization that I may be affiliated with.
Reload icon is © Stephen Horlander;
Firefox logo is by Jon Hicks, and is a trademark of The Mozilla Foundation.
GetFirefox buttons are from rakaz