Firefox and built in RSS feed utility

[phishphreek]

Don't know how many people have downloaded and installed the newest release from Firefox (1.0) but they have a built in RSS feed. If there is a RSS feed available you will see a little icon on the bottom right of the browser. (such as when you are on the AO main page) When you click on it, it says "suscribe to RSS feed" and you can create a bookmark for it. It is a very useful feature to have.

Now the part I don't like about it.

It gives you the option to open RSS feeds in tabs. It will then proceed to open ALL of the RSS links in the different tabs. If enough people started using this all the time, isn't there a potential for it to DOS the servers? I could see if it opened one tab at a time, but it opens all tabs and tries to load all tabs at once.

A site like AO probably wouldn't have a problem with this... but much smaller sites would.

[phernandez]

Ha, you're right!

I think they may have intended for users to dig down to the individual entries and launch a tab from there. As it stands now though, it's a pretty overreaching option. Being occassionally lazy myself, I can see how I'll just perform a blanket "show in tabs" instead of picking and choosing. Imagine every user doing the same a couple of times a day?

It's something they'll have to address as RSS feeds become the norm and especially if they continue to take marketshare from IE (which they are). Maybe they can implement a staggered approach so that servers don't get pegged with simultaneous requests from the same user.

That, and my system slowed to a crawl trying to open all those tabs, ouch.

[phishphreek]

I have been playing a bit more with the RSS features and I've decided that I like that Sage firefox plugin better than the built in RSS feature. There is too much opportunity for abuse with the built in RSS "open all at once" option.

http://sage.mozdev.org/

[phernandez]

Looks sharp. Thanks for the update!

I'll check it out on my home machine.