firefox 3 and enclosures (recap)
Posted by Will Kahn-Greene
Back in December and January, I worked on some patches for Firefox 3 that enhanced the feed preview page. I wrote a post about it back then… but I’m updating that post with recent screenshots and a better description of the work. The previous post was mostly about how great FOSS is.
The patches fell into two big features. First, I added enclosure detection to the FeedProcessor and then modified FeedWriter to show enclosures alongside the entries. This has two huge benefits: it allows you to easily tell if the feed has enclosures and it allows you to see what they are, how big, what type of media, …
Second, I modified Firefox so that it allows you to associate video podcasts with an application, audio podcasts with another application, and all other kinds of feeds with a third application. The benefit here is that you can send media podcasts to an application that handles that well (*cough*Miro*cough*) and regular news feeds to a different application that handles that well.
Screenshot of Firefox 2 feed preview page:
Screenshot of Firefox 3 feed preview page:
Of the two features, I hear the most comments about the first one mostly along the lines of, “I’m so glad I don’t have to view source to see the enclosures anymore!” The second feature isn’t as immediately exciting. The implementation of distinguishing feeds is intentionally simple and there are a lot of corner cases where it doesn’t work very well. Also, there aren’t many applications that can really take advantage of it. I expect this second feature to flourish as Firefox development continues and video/audio podcasting evolves.
11 Responses to “firefox 3 and enclosures (recap)”
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June 12th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
[...] more, see Firefox 3 and enclosures by Will [...]
June 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
[...] Firefox 3 and enclosures??? Will [...]
June 15th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
[...] Firefox 3 and enclosures??? Will [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 2:49 am
[...] more, see Firefox 3 and enclosures by Will [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 2:49 am
[...] more, see Firefox 3 and enclosures by Will [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 3:04 am
[...] more, see Firefox 3 and enclosures by Will [...]
June 16th, 2008 at 11:26 am
[...] más información, visitá Firefox 3 y anexos por Will Guaraldi (en [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 2:33 am
[...] ???? ? ???????? RSS, Atom ? ????.: ?????? ???????????? ? ??????????? ????? (enclosures) ? ????????? ???? ??????, ?? ?????, ??????? [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[...] This is my favorite feature, of course, because it makes for a much smoother connection from web browsing to subscribing in Miro. And maybe the best part is that it was developed for Firefox 3 by the Miro team! It’s a perfect example of how open-source organizations can work together to give everyone a better experience. Here’s developer Will Guaraldi’s writeup of the new feature. [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Thanks for pointing this out! What an improvement where I would normally not expect it.
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:00 pm
[...] más información, visitá Firefox 3 y anexos por Will Guaraldi (en [...]