Who needs RSS when you have Firefox?

by phil on Saturday Feb 14, 2004 12:41 PM

I dumped RSS because I still wanted to consume the web with yummy designs. Thanks to Firefox, Mozilla's newest beta browser, you can combine the utility of RSS feeds with the aesthetics of the web. Just make a folder of your favorite bookmarks and then press the "Open in Tabs" button. All of your bookmarks then array out as a sliver of tabbed windows. You can then cycle through each page with ease. Repeat the process again and again and this then becomes your periodic digest of infokipple.

Note: RSS is an all-text version of websites. You run a program and it will download these RSS feeds like e-mail newsletters. This tool is popular among information junkies, but its plain-text nature is dull to me.

Also: It's fun seeing the tabs of twenty great sites explode onto my screen. First you see each tab with what looks like a recycle-bin icon spinning around. These spinning ant-like tabs then stop at an exponential rate, *ploop* *ploop* *ploop* *splat*. As I then peer over the tabs, each of which are adorned with a unique icon representing the site, I feel like the commander of the best deck of Magic: the Gathering cards. Mmmnn.

Rant: It's lame how Internet Explorer poorly implements icon-associations for websites. Microsoft invented the technology and then they don't even support it! It's like President Bush underfunding his No Child Left Behind Act!

Comments

Bob said on February 14, 2004 3:24 PM:

FYI, with some hacking RSS can contain style as well. I enabled it on my RSS feed, but it requires wrecking any semantic markup you may have liked in the XML originally.

"Rich Site Summaries" are simply summaries, after all, and though the default Movable Type RSS feed is just text, there is always the option to summarize your site in your own special way. For you I could imagine simply a big block of color "summarizing" your mood that day...?

Bob said on February 14, 2004 3:25 PM:

p.s. use the Avant Browser shell for IE if you want its rendering popularity as well as better favicon support and tabs and more...