RSS, Firefox and Thunderbird

Firefox and Thunderbird are the latest browser and mailreader from Mozilla.org. They both support RSS feeds.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird can present RSS feeds as email messages. Each feed shows as a new folder in a News and Blogs account. Folders show what new items are unread and when you delete an item it goes to the thrash can. This is my favorite reader so far, and I expect it will continue to improve as TB moves into 1.0 FCS.

Firefox

Firefox has built-in support for RSS. One way this shows is as live bookmarks: a bookmark folder whose content is built from the news items in a given feed. I use that for some news feeds (like BBC News, but I don't find it useful for project news. Firefox also has extensions that do a more complete job and that are close to the traditional desktop RSS readers. The one I have used is Sage, which worked pretty well but had some rough edges. At some point I'll try it again and see if I want to use Firefox or Thunderbird as my reader.

-- EduardoPelegri - 10 Nov 2004