Feed Sidebar 4.0 has been released for all users of any previous version of Feed Sidebar, and this version has two great improvements over version 3.1:

1. You can now sort your feeds by three different criteria:
   
2. Feeds are now updated constantly, rather than all at once. So if you have 60 feeds, and you have Feed Sidebar set to update once per hour, instead of updating all 60 feeds after an hour, Feed Sidebar will now update one feed every minute. This should fix any issues users have had with Firefox locking up while feeds are being update.

You can read more about these improvements in my previous blog posts: Feed Sidebar 3.2 Beta 3: A Gentler Feed Updater, Feed Sidebar 3.2 Beta Update, and Sort your feeds in Feed Sidebar.

To upgrade to version 4.0, you can install this update from Mozilla Add-ons, or if you already have have Feed Sidebar installed, it will be automatically downloaded for you.

I was thinking it would be neat to add a recommendations component to Feed Sidebar. It would work like this:

1. You'd opt in to share your list of feeds anonymously.
2. Your list of feeds is sent to a central server.
3. Other users do the same thing.
4. Magic happens.
5. The Feed Sidebar would occasionally recommend a new feed based on what other people like you are reading.

Would anyone besides me use this? I know that other Web-based feed readers have similar features, but those of us who control our own data are getting left out in the cold.

I've been working on decreasing the CPU consumption of my Feed Sidebar Firefox extension; one of its main problems is that when it's time to update the feeds, Firefox can grind to a halt while the Sidebar starts to make tens or hundreds of HTTP requests.

A solution I've settled on allows the sidebar to slowly work through your feeds list, spreading out the updates over the interval you've set (e.g., update every hour), so that there's never one big update. For example, if you have 50 feeds, and you have set Feed Sidebar to update them every hour, it will now update a single feed every 72 seconds (60 minutes / 50 feeds = 72 seconds per feed), rather than updating all 50 feeds at the same time every 60 minutes. However, in order to keep the sidebar working as it previously did where all of your feeds would update as soon as you started up Firefox, the sidebar will still do one initial update, leaving only a second between each feed update.

You can install this beta version right here if you want to take advantage of the new update mechanism. Some changes that you'll notice:

• The statusbar no longer shows text like "Next update: 4:32 PM". This is because your feeds are always being updated.
• As each feed is updated, text will appear in the status bar like so: "Updating 1 of 50 (Joe Smith's Blog)..." You can click on this text to visit the site of the feed that is being refreshed.
• If you click "Mark All as Read", it won't affect any feeds that were refreshed less than 3 seconds ago. This is to avoid accidentally marking things as read before you realized they were there.
• There is now an option to disable automatic updates completely.
• You can still quickly update all of your feeds at any time by clicking the Reload button in the sidebar.
• The pop-up notifications that used to appear after a full update ("100 new feed items") are now specific to each feed. The title is the name of the feed, the image is the website's shortcut icon, and it will either say "2 new items" (or 3 or 4...), or if there's only one new item, the title of that item will appear in the notification box.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback (comment on this post, email cfinke@gmail.com, or ping me on Twitter) so that when I release this to the general Feed Sidebar public, I'm not inundated with e-mails saying "Why didn't you do it this way?" (Again, you can install the new version here.)

I've published an update to the beta of Feed Sidebar that I talked about here: Sort Your Feeds in Feed Sidebar. In this version (3.2pre2), I've made the following changes:

• Enhanced the sorting mechanisms so that updates occur more seamlessly.
• Added some accessibility fixes, courtesy of Marco Zehe.
• Fixed some security holes related to JavaScript injection in the preview window
• Added a little delay to Feed Sidebar's first feed update each browsing session to allow Firefox to start up a little more quickly.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback (send to cfinke@gmail.com) so that when I release this to the general Feed Sidebar public, I'm not inundated with e-mails saying "Why didn't you do it this way?" You can install the new version here.

A lot of people have asked for the ability to sort the feeds that appear in the Feed Sidebar extension for Firefox, so I've taken some time to integrate some basic sorting options. I would like to get some feedback on this feature before releasing it to the general Feed Sidebar audience, so I've uploaded a version for testing here. (You may have to save it to your computer and open it with Firefox in order to install it.)

The sorts I've implemented are:

• Default: Sorts the feeds in the order that you added them to your bookmarks. This is how your feeds have been sorted up to this point.
• Name: Sorts the feeds alphabetically by feed title. (This doesn't yet ignore things like "a", "an", "the", but it will before the final release.)
• Last Updated: Sorts the feeds with the last updated feed at the top.

Please leave any feedback you have either as a comment on this post or by emailing me at cfinke@gmail.com.

Feed Sidebar is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that displays the items from your newsfeeds in a sidebar. It can be downloaded for free from Mozilla Add-ons.

I just uploaded an update for Feed Sidebar to Mozilla Add-ons. Changes since version 3.0.1 include:

New Features

• Added an option to always have new items open in tabs
• Added a button to the search bar to quickly show all items, both read and unread
• Removed "Mark All as Read" and "Mark All as Unread" from feed and item context menus

Bug Fixes

• Sidebar now shows the name you gave the feed, not the feed's default title.
• Marking a feed (or all items) as read is now much faster. In my tests, it only took about 5% of the time it used to.
• Clicking on a feed name in the preview pane now opens the homepage, not a useless blank page.

The update can be installed from Mozilla Add-ons, or you can wait for Firefox to notify you of the available update. If you're not using Feed Sidebar, give it a try; it has seen a lot of improvements in the past few months.

Firefox 3 introduced many new features for extension developers, and I decided to take advantage of some of them in order to update my Feed Sidebar extension. Version 3.0 of Feed Sidebar is now out, and these are the main features and changes I added:

1. Look and feel: I updated all of the icons for the extension to blend in with Firefox 3's new OS-specific look and feel. The sidebar's toolbar uses the native theme icons, and the toolbar button is specifically designed to fit in on each of Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows. (The toolbar buttons for Windows, Mac, and Linux are shown respectively below.)

   

2. Continuous updating: Feed Sidebar used to only check for feed updates when the sidebar was open; now it checks whether the sidebar is open or not (and notifies you when it finds updates). Big improvements in memory usage and performance were necessary to make this possible.
3. Offline capabilities: the extension now caches all of your feeds, so if you go offline, you still have access to all of the data that was in the feeds, and you can read it while offline. When you go offline, Feed Sidebar goes into "Offline Mode", and automatically opens the stored summary from the feed when you click on an item rather than trying to open the webpage the item references. This features makes use of the new online/offline events in Firefox 3.

   Here is a screenshot of what offline reading looks like:

   

4. Places integration: when you add or delete a live bookmark in Firefox 3, Feed Sidebar will detect that via Firefox 3's nsINavBookmarksService interface. When you add a new feed, it will instantly appear in the sidebar, and the reverse is true for deleting a feed.
5. Caching: as soon as you start Firefox, Feed Sidebar will fill the sidebar with the feeds you were reading the last time Firefox shut down, even if you are now offline. This is made possible via the new JSON libraries that shipped with Firefox 3.

Feed Sidebar 3.0 is now available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Mozilla updated their recommended add-ons list today (see this blog post by Basil Hashem for the full story), but the main change I'd like to draw your attention to is that both Mahalo Share and Feed Sidebar were added to the list. Hurray!

Feed Sidebar 2.0 has been released. Upgrade now to enable filtering your feeds with the search bar and to experience the big improvements in performance and memory usage.

Filter your feeds with the search bar.

You can install it at Mozilla Add-ons.

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.