363968 - location bar UI for multiple feeds

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect)

Description

[Robert Sayre]

Some sites present a large number of feeds, containing duplicates. Experience shows heuristics are extremely prone to dataloss, and IE7 doesn't do any of it. But, we also don't want to present our users with a bunch duplicate options.

Comment 2

[Seth Bindernagel]

Attachment: Screen shot of multiple RSS options for user to select

Comment 3

[Seth Bindernagel]

Thanks, Phil.  Just adding my comments from Bug 426480.

I click on the RSS icon and get three choices, sometimes different from the
previous selections, that I have to choose.  Don't know what ATOM vs. RSS vs.
RSS 2.0 means.  Not sure if the end user would ever care.  

Screen shot attached.

My recommendation:  make two selections:  "Add" or "Subscribe"  Then, an
"Advanced..." if you really know what is going on and want to select.

Comment 4

[Atul Varma [:atul]]

I've blogged about this here:

  http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=158

Blair McBride mentions the following in the first comment:

  "The sites that give the same content in different formats have got it majorly wrong. This practice is from the era when format support in feed readers wasn’t guaranteed - now it is, but unfortunately we still have to deal with the consequences."

I propose one potential solution here:

  http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=158#comment-951

What I'm wondering is, if Blair is right and we're past this weird era where different feed readers only supported certain feed formats, is there a way we can shield the end-user from this schism?  For instance, what if we looked at the mime-type of the feed--text/xml, application/xml+rss, application/xml+atom, etc--and automatically pick one for the user instead of making them choose?  Are there legitimate cases where a page would offer multiple feeds in multiple mime-type formats where the user may legitimately want to choose between them?

If people think it's worth exploring solutions here, I'm interested in hacking one together.

Comment 5

[Thomas Stache]

I thought Ben Goodger put in some smarts into the feeds dropdown back in the day? Only if it fails to make sense of the feeds it shows the popup. Can someone have a look at the code?

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Nope, no smarts, only "smarts" - the bug that backed it out should have "false positives" in the summary, and is the reason comment 0 says "experience has shown heuristics are extremely prone to dataloss." Two legit cases off the top of my head: an Atom feed of your blog posts, and an RSS feed of the del.icio.us bookmarks that you display as a second column, or, an Atom feed with partial content and no ads, and an RSS feed of full content that a third party inserts ads into. Once someone suggests the heuristic of not treating <link>s that aren't same-origin as duplicates, then I'll work on legitimate cases that don't involve "this other one is produced by a third party whose choice of format I don't control."

What I suspect would work, despite being ugly, is to individually target known cases of duplicates: I doubt that anyone would exactly duplicate the older WordPress style of "title="RSS 0.92"/title="RSS 2.0"/title="Atom 0.3"" or the older MovableType "title="Posts on 'Foo' (Atom)"/"Posts on 'Foo' (RSS 1.0)"/"Posts on 'Foo' (RSS 2.0)"" accidentally without also having identical content in the feeds.

Comment 7

[Thomas Stache]

Ah, I didn't notice bug 309085 removed the "smarts". Strange that no links/dependencies exist between the bugs forming the history of this feature...

Comment 8

[Simon Bünzli]

What about removing the menu from the feed button altogether and always subscribe to the first feed (which should be correct in the majority of cases) while still letting people subscribe to other alternates through the Bookmarks menu?

This might make a few feeds harder to discover but should push content authors to get their priorities right and would quite improve the user experience in the cases where content authors are unable or unwilling to do so.

The discussion revived: http://www.mikealrogers.com/archives/490

Comment 9

[Simon Bünzli]

Alternatively, what about showing a tiny drop-down arrow in the multiple-feeds case so that clicking the feed icon always does the same thing (load the (first) feed) while still making it obvious that there would have been several alternates to the more knowledgeable user?

Comment 10

[Alex Limi (:limi) — Firefox UX Team]

I think this is one of the cases where sites have mostly updated their RSS icons to only offer one format since the original bug was filed, and we shouldn't do anything to try to detect duplicates here. Let's keep it simple.

(I won't close the bug if people really want to work on this, but that would be my UI recommendation. We are already down to 2% of 2% use cases here :)

Comment 11

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.