Better Living through Software

CNET recently wrote a review of Vista, where they complained that “IE7 RSS feeds get preferential treatment”.  They say:

“… there’s a Gadget for subscribed RSS feeds. We downloaded and installed Firefox 2, made Firefox our default browser, and quickly set up a few RSS feed subscriptions. Guess what? The Windows Vista Gadget was unresponsive to our efforts, displaying only the default MSN feeds from Microsoft. You have to use Internet Explorer 7 or choose a Firefox-friendly Gadget instead.”

I understand the disappointment, but this is a limitation in Firefox, not Vista.  And it’s easy to correct.  I would happily help anyone associated with Firefox add the required support.

If the reviewer had instead chosen to subscribe using Bloglines toolbar, Newsgator, FeedDemon, or any of a number of other non-Microsoft RSS readers, they would have seen the subscription update in the gadget.  The subscription in Microsoft Office Outlook and Windows Live Mail Desktop would update, too.  In other words, the fact that the gadget is able to share the feedlist is a demonstration that we have made the shared feedlist totally open — and plenty of ISVs already take advantage of this fact.

Firefox isn’t actually an RSS engine, which is why the reviewer seems confused.  Firefox simply allows you to associate feeds with an external reader.  On Vista, any app which wishes can register to tap into the shared feed list, and we support any number of applications all sharing the same list.  Allowing FF to register the shared feedlist on Vista as an external app would be trivial, and would enable Firefox to better integrate with the whole ecosystem of RSS readers — including cross-machine and cloud sync as supported by Newsgator.

I understand why Firefox might be hesitant to integrate with the shared feedlist.  It’s not available on Linux, after all.  But it’s certainly not a MSFT-only feature — in fact, quite the opposite.  It’s the feature that opens up our RSS platform to a whole ecosystem of vendors who are already taking advantage.

~

Update: I wrote the ten lines of code necessary to make Firefox integrate with Vista’s RSS platform.  Here it is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under IE7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.