276929 - Individual article from RSS feed should be viewed in web browser, not Thunderbird

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(MailNews Core :: Feed Reader, enhancement)

Description

[Robert Rothenberg]

There should at least be an option to view RSS feed articles in the default web
browser rather than from within Thunderbird. It's particularly noticeable when
one views an article that has a link to continue (for more details, or when an
article is divided among several pages, as with many nytimes.com articles).  The
link opens a new windows in FireFox (or whatever the web browser is) rather than
in the same window.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

There *is* such an option.  In the header envelope for every RSS item, there is 
a Website header that you can click to open the page into the browser.  And if 
you completely want to suppress the page being rendered in TB:  Manage 
Subscriptions, edit the sub you want to change, and check the box that says 
"Show the article summary instead of loading the web page."

Some feeds will give you almost nothing as a summary, some will give a 
reasonable text, or stripped-down-HTML, equivalent of whatever's on the page.

(In reply to comment #0)
> when one views an article that has a link to continue ... The
> link opens a new windows in FireFox (or whatever the web browser is) rather
> than in the same window.

You mean "rather than in the TB window"?  It would break the conceptual model of 
viewing messages in a message window to show content that's entirely not 
contained in the original "message".

Comment 2

[Robert Rothenberg]

(In reply to comment #1)
> There *is* such an option.  In the header envelope for every RSS item, there is 
> a Website header that you can click to open the page into the browser.  And if 
> you completely want to suppress the page being rendered in TB:  Manage 
> Subscriptions, edit the sub you want to change, and check the box that says 
> "Show the article summary instead of loading the web page."

Not really. I want to view the web site, but in FireFox instead of Thunderbird.
There should be an option to explicitly do that.  I shouldn't havce to expand
the headers and click on a web site link for every article.

Note that users have FireFox (or Mozilla or IE or Opera) configured a certain
way to reflect how they want to view web sites.  TB ignores these settings when
viewing RSS feed pages.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

"Not really"?  What is that supposed to mean?

It sounds like what you really want is to have the RSS capability *in* Firefox.
Which, in fact, already has this -- it's called "live bookmarks".

If that doesn't do what you want either, then you're going to have to do a much 
better job of describing just what it is you want.

Comment 4

[Robert Rothenberg]

Ok, I've got "Show Article summary..." checked in the root new feed account and
for the individual subscriptions, but it just loads the web site anyway. (For
another newsfeed account, it does show article summaries instead of loading the
web page.)

So this might just be a bug.

Irregardless of whether it is a bug, when displaying the relevant web pages, I
would rather it launch the web browser than show them within TB.

(I'm aware that there's an RSS reader in FireFox, but for various reasons I like
the news feed from within TB.)

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.