If anyone who has been using Feed Sidebar is interested in testing out the next version, you can install this nightly build of Feed Sidebar 2.0pre. Besides massive improvements in performance and compatibility for various feed types, it sports a nifty new search bar that you can use to filter your feeds:

(Clicking the magnifying glass hides the search bar.)

Please send any bug reports to cfinke@gmail.com or leave them as comments on this post.

I've just released an update to the Feed Sidebar Firefox extension that adds essentially every major feature request that I've gotten since version 1.2 came out:

• Biggest improvement: Feed Sidebar now has its own history for tracking which items are read, rather than using the browser history. This means that you can clear your browsing history without clearing your feed reading history.
• Feed Sidebar now uses Firefox's native feed parser. This slims down the code in the extension and (probably) the number of bugs.
• The sidebar now remembers which feeds you collapse, and the next time those feeds load, they'll still be collapsed. This has been requested ever since the first version came out, so I feel good about getting it done.
• You can unsubscribe from a feed directly from the sidebar by right-clicking on it and choosing "Unsubscribe."
• You can choose to display all items from all feeds, not just new items. If you enable this (in the Feed Sidebar preferences dialog), items you've read will be light gray; new items will appear as they always have.
• I moved the update status ("Next update: 11:00 PM", "Checking 123 of 456 feeds...") to a status bar inside the sidebar. This clears up room in the toolbar for more buttons, if necessary.
• The first time you run Firefox after installing the extension, the sidebar will open automatically, and the Feeds button will be added to the toolbar. (I had gotten lots of comments along the lines of "I installed it; now what do I do?" Hopefully, this will mitigate that problem.)

Overall, I thinks this version is much sleeker and much more usable than the last, which is pretty much all that matters. You can download the latest version of Feed Sidebar from Mozilla Add-ons.

There are a number of extension updates available today simply due to new translations:

AutoAuth 1.1.1

• French (fr-FR)
• Dutch (nl-NL)
• Spanish (es-ES)
• Japanese (ja-JP)
• Portuguese (pt-PT)

Feed Sidebar 1.1.1

• German (de-DE)
• French (fr-FR)
• Dutch (nl-NL)
• Italian (it-IT)
• Japanese (ja-JP)
• Russian (ru-RU)

RSS Ticker 1.9.1

• French (fr-FR)

The updates can be downloaded from each add-on's respective homepage or via your browser's auto-update feature for extensions. Thank you to the translators at BabelZilla for all their hard work.

I've pushed out updates to two of my Firefox extensions: AutoAuth and Feed Sidebar (formerly Feedbar).

AutoAuth 1.0.1 includes a fix for a bug that was causing about:config dialogs for modifying values to close as soon as they were opened.

Feed Sidebar 1.0.1 brings the extension out of alpha, and it includes several new locales, a spiffy new toolbar, and general bug fixes.

Both extensions can be downloaded from their homepages (AutoAuth, Feed Sidebar), and AutoAuth can be downloaded from Mozilla Addons as well.

I've finally gotten around to updating RSS Ticker. Among other things like new locales and code optimization, this version includes a rewrite of the options dialog and its related code, so any reported bugs related to the Options dialog should be fixed now. This includes the known incompatibility with the All-in-One Sidebar extension.

You can download the latest version of RSS Ticker 1.9 from the RSS Ticker homepage.

On a related note: I originally wrote RSS Ticker so that I could use Firefox's Live Bookmarks to manage my feeds but still have an easy way to see new items from a small number of feeds. Since then, the number of feeds I follow has grown, and the ticker interface has become too restrictive for me. If this sounds like you, you might want to check out my new extension called Feedbar. It uses your Live Bookmarks for feed management like RSS Ticker, but it displays the new items in a sidebar, so it's easier to scan through a large number of feeds.

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.

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.