I am a big user of RSS feeds. When I first read that RSS should be part of Firefox I was hoping for something more. I have been a very happy user of the RSS Reader Panel by Flyson from Japan. The project is now under development by a new team and is now called Sage. They have improved the already great extension in many ways and I expect some nice changes in the future.

I think the Firefox team could learn something about how RSS should be integrated in the browser. Using the Sidebar for RSS is a pretty good idea if you ask me. I read the headlines in the left side of the screen and see the content of on the right side. One of the big thing the current RSS solution in Firefox misses is an unobtrusive way to tell the user that there is new content in some of the feeds they have subscribed to.

The idea of clicking at something in the status bar to get a Live Bookmarkis works ok ( still not perfect). But there are also many sites with a RSS feed that don't give an icon in the status bar. One of the sites I use is The Inquirer They have a orange RSS button on their site. If you click on it you get some scrambled text. How on earth do you expect that normal visitors should know what to do next? It more looks like Firefox has made an error with the feed.

Update The Inquirer has now added a Live Bookmark for their site. Read more here

Erik Arvidsson, a new developer on the Sage team has some thoughts how RSS could be improved in Firefox. You can take a look at it here: Erik's weblog site views counter

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