I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

Announcing Feedbar (Firefox extension)

About a year ago, I wrote my first RSS-related Firefox extension, RSS Ticker. It was intended to be used for getting instant notifications from a small number of feeds. As the number of feeds I follow has grown, I’ve found the ticker interface inadequate and frustrating, so I’ve been working on a new RSS extension [...]

About a year ago, I wrote my first RSS-related Firefox extension, RSS Ticker. It was intended to be used for getting instant notifications from a small number of feeds. As the number of feeds I follow has grown, I’ve found the ticker interface inadequate and frustrating, so I’ve been working on a new RSS extension for Firefox over the past couple of weeks.

I’m calling it “Feedbar,” and it’s a sidebar for Firefox that aggregates all of the unread items from your Live Bookmarks in one place.

Partial screenshot of Feedbar
Click for full view.

It’s not trying to be yet another standalone RSS reader that just uses Firefox as a platform (like Sage, infoRSS, or Wizz RSS). It doesn’t have its own feed manager – it just uses the feeds you’ve already bookmarked and shows you the items from those feeds that you haven’t visited. It’s intended to be simple, easy to use, and something that could be included by default in Firefox without seeming out of place. As far as I know, there’s not another extension already doing this.

You can download Feedbar 1.0 alpha 1 at the Feedbar homepage. Feedback is greatly appreciated.



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