First Impressions of New Thunderbird and Firefox
I downloaded the
releases of Thunderbird and Firefox at work this morning. First
impressions:
- Wow, Thunderbird has RSS support! You can read RSS right in your
mail client, without using Hep or another RSS-to-email converter. For
the record, I think this is great. Clients should try to support as
many standard formats as possible, and if they’re going to support mail
and news, they should support RSS. I expect that RSS/Atom support will
be a standard feature for mail clients in the future. If all people
want is an easy way to read RSS feeds in their mail client, this new
Thunderbird might mean they don’t need to use Hep, and that’s fine with
me. However, I don’t think it will ever be possible for every client
(or
server) to support every protocol and format that a user might
need. For a lot of people, a simple RSS-to-email bridge is not going
to be enough, and that’s where Hep will continue to be valuable. - As far as the RSS support itself, it’s definitely in the early
stages of implementation. Thunderbird can’t autodetect feeds, it can’t
import or use OPML files, and in my few minutes of testing I ran into a
couple of display bugs. Also, I don’t like how it defaults to
downloading the entire linked-to page, rather than just showing the
text contained in the RSS feed. But I’m sure all these things will get
better with time. For now, it’s just cool to see completely integrated
RSS support in a mail client. src="http://www.fettig.net/weblog/thunderbird-show-images-button.png" align="right" border="1">Thunderbird finally lets you download images on
a message-by-message basis. So you can disable loading images
globally, but still choose to see the images from people you trust.
This is the one big annoyance I had left with Thunderbird, so I was
psyched to see that button!- Wow, Firefox supports RSS, too!
The implementation works like this. When you visit
a site with an RSS feed, Firefox detects it and displays a little RSS
orange icon in the status bar. Then you click on the icon to bookmark
the RSS feed. The feed then acts as a dynamic bookmarks folder, with
each linked-to item in the feed showing up as a bookmark. Now, this
doesn’t strike me as a great way to read news and weblogs. But after
thinking about it for a minute it struck me - this is a great way to do
server-based bookmarking! Keep your bookmarks on a server (like
del.icio.us), access them from anywhere. You can even have a bookmarks
list being maintained by a group. - Firefox also has a really nice little search toolbar that shows
up on the bottom of your page when you do a search. It lets you jump
forward and back, or highlight your search term on the entire page.
Searching in Firefox was nicely dialog-less already, with the
command-line style hit-slash-and-start-typing feature; now it’s even
nicer.
Side note: See those images included in this post? I’m playing with a
new Hep feature. Send an HTML email with included images to your
weblog, and Hep will pull out the images, upload them using metaWeblog.newMediaObject,
and update the orginal message to point to the uploaded URLs.
Update, 3:06 PM:
More thoughts on RSS support in Firefox and Thunderbird from Simon Willison, Unclespam.
I still think Hep has some uses for even the latest RSS-capable Thunderbird. I tend to read during my lunch break at work, and don’t want to have to skip thru the items I’ve read already when I get home and start reading again. I think Hep will be a crucial piece of software in helping me achieve this ideal.
I just stumbled across your project today and look forward to trying it out very soon. Nice work! I plan on accessing my RSS feeds thru Thunderbird via IMAP, so that I can use various clients at various sites, and still keep track of which items I’ve read.
(I have seen Bloglines, and after trying it out for a couple days, I didn’t really like the interface)
Comment by Shawn — September 14, 2004 @ 3:26 pm