263943 - need a way to preview livemark feeds before having to subscribe

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

Description

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

There is currently no way to see what the heck you are subscribing to when you
select a livemark feed. For some sites (eg, http://www.electoral-vote.com/),
it's not at all clear as to what sort of content is available in their feed. Not
to mention most feeds are unhelpfully named "RSS". To simply just take a peek
currently, you must:

Select the livemark entry from the status bar icon.
Choose a name and location to add it to your bookmarks.
Click add.
Navigate your bookmarks to the entry you've just created.
Open the livemark, look at the item titles.
If the title is ambiguous, select an item to see what actual URL is linked.
Navigate again through the bookmarks tree to the livemark.
Right click and delete it, assuming you were just curious what was available.

There needs to be some way to preview a livemark feed. All that it needs to list
is probably the title, maybe the image, and all items, including where they link to.

Alternatively, instead of a separate preview function, the livemark list in the
status bar could already be "live", such as:

[livemark icon]
  \ title
      \ (loading...)
      \ item 1
      \ item 2
      \ ----------------------
      \ subscribe to this feed

Or something like that. This might even better expose to novice users what the
heck that icon is for, as they would directly see the list of headlines or
whatever content is being served.

Comment 1

[nrlz]

I like this idea. And it also supports the notion of separating the content from
it's representation. Since RSS is (sometimes) an alternate representation of
that website, I can use the livemarks statusbar icon to navigate that website.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Fixed in Firefox 2 and later.