Rob Park wrote: > The thing I like most about [this Mozilla Firebird RSS reader extension] > it is that it's integrated right there into my browser, which makes it > very convenient (the idea of having a separate RSS feed program is kinda > silly to me, since the whole point of RSS feeds is to tell me if there's > anything new on a page to warrant me visiting that page). I'm mixed on this issue. I used to think the same way until I considered scalability--I might not always want to use Firebird. Other users on the same machine might not want to use Firebird. I might choose to use some other Free Software browser. If I do, I wouldn't want the rather large dependency of a browser (or browser suite, in the case of Mozilla) for news aggregation. Also, I would still want access to my aggregated feed information, no matter how I choose to read the news. So, this makes me think I do not want the news aggregator to be a part of my browser. But on the other hand, there are some things in common between a news aggregator and a web browser--try Lifearea (I think that's how it is spelled) and you'll see what I mean. There appears to be no cache in Lifearea. So Lifearea needlessly downloads site graphics it already downloaded before (add Slashdot.org as a feed and you'll see it download the Slashdot logo from Slashdot.org multiple times). I notice this because I'm on a slow link. Lifearea doesn't seem to pay attention to my user CSS so I can't easily style the text I'm reading to make it easier on my eyes and artistic taste. There are probably more things I would notice if I used it longer. I'm guessing similar limitations exist with all separate news aggregators.
