Firefox (Live Bookmarks, Search Status, Religion)

The 1.0 release of Firefox includes a new “Live Bookmarks” feature; that page links back to Syndic8 (many thanks to whoever did this).

The best description of this feature is probably “Great start”. Ben Goodger says:

Firefox’s RSS capabilities are designed to expose as much of RSS to regular people as makes sense for light news reading/dynamic content. The intent is to allow the user to have a Live Bookmark on her toolbar and be fed the newest headlines daily, the latest bargains, the latest posts on some topic, etc. Our goals do not stretch much farther beyond this. Given the creativity that we’ve seen so far in the Firefox development community, I am sure it won’t be long before this simple RSS support meets and then exceeds these goals. There’s also Sage, for those looking for something a bit more powerful.

I would be happy to provide additional Firefox in Syndic8; if anyone has any ideas, just drop me an email.

Don Park describes how link tags can be used to enable feed auto-discovery. It would also be possible to use the Syndic8 web service interface to look up sites. There is a function which, if given the the URL to a site, will return Syndic8 FeedID (if known) for the site.

Here’s another great little extension (unrelated to RSS). SearchStatus displays meta-information from Google, Alexa, Yahoo, and MSN, in a compact status bar entry. If you try to install this using Firefox 1.0, you will need to tell Firefox that it is OK to download and install code for this site.

The Spread Firefox campaign is taking on all of the energy of a religious campaign. As I’ve said many times, “It takes a long time to be an instant success.” Years of hard work by countless folks are now paying off, and the future is looking bright.