Thursday, April 14, 2011
restoring rss icon to firefox 4 location bar
I recently upgraded to firefox 4, and while I'm loving the increased speed, it has required some customization, most of which I learned about from this lifehacker post. Today I was linked to a friend's blog, and sought to add it to my google reader feeds. lo and behold, when I looked to the location bar for the rss icon, I found it wasn't there. further investigation showed that the blog did indeed have feeds enabled, but it turns out that they've changed the behavior in the switch from FF 3.x to 4.
img credit: technophilia
Apparently, not enough people used it the behavior was removed and the built in solution is disabled by default.
Alexander Limi of the Firefox user experience team writes:
The RSS feed icon wasn't removed, it was moved into the bookmarks menu. Even among our very advanced users, this button has the lowest percentage use of all our buttons, and is not used anywhere near enough to justify being in the main UI.
It's annoying to have to do it, but fortunately there are ways around the matter:
- One solution involves using the built in customization tools (right-click on tool bar, choose customize, drag icon to desired location and click done). While this works, it's unsatisfactory because unlike the old icon/behavior, it is always present and taking up space, even on sites without feeds.
- A better solution that restores the 3.x functionality involves installing an extension -- RSS Icon. I'm using it myself currently and it works as expected. Note that per the dev,
This addon DOES NOT look for links to rss/atom files in the body of a document.
Good luck and happy browsing!
Labels: firefox, hacks, lifehacker
amr's brain blurted out at 11:28 PM 
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