I’ve spent the past 24 hours playing with the new releases of “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ (1.0PR) and “Thunderbird”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ (0.8), available from mozilla.org. Overall, I’m very impressed. The respective teams are obviously hard at work improving the software, and these projects (indeed, “mozilla.org”:http://mozilla.org in general, in my opinion) continue to serve as excellent examples of Open Source in action.
Both Firefox and Thunderbird now have some sort of RSS/Atom support built in. In Firefox, they’re calling it “Live Bookmarks”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/live-bookmarks.html. In Thunderbird, it’s a new account type, RSS News & Blogs. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to break down and start using an aggregator to get my news and updates, so I was excited to hear about both features. One of the things that’s prevented me from really embracing a feed aggregator in the past has been the need to run an additional application: can’t it be integrated into my existing work pattern?
Unfortunately, neither Firefox or Thunderbird is going to become my full-time aggregator for a very simple reason: “Galeon”:http://galeon.sourceforge.net. Well, not Galeon, exactly, but rather features and ideas that Galeon has introduced that I think Firefox and Thunderbird could benefit from. Let’s take the apps one at a time.
First, Firefox. Firefox’s Live Bookmarks create a folder-like view of a particular feed, and add an option to “Open In Tabs,” like all bookmark folders. So I can easily see the headlines, but if I want to quickly browse the articles, I have to open a dozen web pages. Huh, not exactly what I had in mind. Galeon’s MyPortal, though, could be a good jumping off point. After all, it already acts as a display of bookmarks, and since Firefox treats feeds as “live” bookmarks, it seems like a simple extension of the idea.
Thunderbird is a little better; each feed is it’s own “folder,” with posts showing up as messages and the contents showing up in the preview pane. And since it’s coming at things from the e-mail perspective, you can even flag posts as read or unread. Great! That’s what I want! Except, uh, well, I can’t actually *aggregate* things. That is, if I want to read the morning news, I have to look at each folder with new items, individually. This only points out the great usefulness of “Evolution’s”:http://www.novell.com/products/evolution/ vFolders. If Thunderbird supported vFolders, I could create a view of unread News items. Heck, I could create a view of unread items, including mail, news and feed items. Now *that* would be a killer feature.