Firefox 2.0 Feed Preview Behavior (and closing windows)

Submitted by jbreland on Fri, 01/05/2007 - 13:20

For those of you that may be unaware, Firefox includes new Feed Preview capabilities in version 2.0. I discussed it briefly in a previous post:

A major issue that I have with RSS Preview is that Firefox will display this preview page even if the webmaster has already written an XSL transform to display the feed in human-readable form. I find this very frustrating, as I spent a lot of time styling the RSS feed for my site, making sure the look and feel matches that of the rest of the site, takes advantage of certain RSS elements available on my site that may not be available on others, etc. However, Firefox 2.0 ignores all of this and instead displays the feed using its own preview style. While this is a great feature for sites that only display raw XML, I strongly feel that Firefox should respect the webmaster's design if he's taken the time to create and specify a particular style/transform for the feed. At the very least there should be an option for users to enable the built-in preview style for all feeds rather than just raw feeds, with it set to only use the preview style for raw feeds by default.

As stated above, I think this is a great feature for sites that simply display raw XML output - I much prefer Firefox's Feed Preview page over that, as I'm sure most other Firefox users do. However, I still have a major problem with the fact that it will always override an RSS feed with this preview page, regardless of whether or not the developer has supplied his own style or extra content for the page. It's nice to know that I'm not alone on this, as evidenced by this 60+ post thread on the MozillaZine forums. Sadly, though, it seems that the core developers responsible for this change (ie, the ones that "matter") feel that their way is the way it should be done, users be damned. It's actually rather fascinating - read through that thread and count up how many people posted their objections, vs. how many people think it's a good idea. Then read through this bug report and do the same (also count the number of duplicates). Then read through this newsgroup thread and do the same. Anyone see a pattern?

I "solved" this problem for the feed on my own site with this lovely workaround added to the top of my feed:

This is a waste of space and bandwidth in order to appease Firefox 2.0's and Internet Explorer 7's feed sniffing.
By adding this extra and completely unnecessary text to the top of my feed, Firefox and IE7 will display the feed using
my own XSL stylesheet, as it should to begin with, rather than using it's built-in Feed Preview functionality.
You can thank the fine folks at Microsoft and the Mozilla Corporation for for the brain-dead implementation of what should be a very useful feature.

Thanks, Mozilla. Thanks, Microsoft. The reason I'm posting about this again today is because I recently came across some comments that seemed very familiar in VMware's RSS feed:

This is 512 bytes of nonsense, since the Firefox 2 developers, in one of the strangest decisions ever, decided they would obsolete XML styles by overriding them without permission. Furthermore, the developers appear to be disinterested in fixing this. Therefore, we use the unofficial workaround, which includes filling up the first 512 bytes of a document so that the sniffer doesn't encounter the RSS tag. I really enjoy using Firefox, but this particular behavior really annoys me! Anyway, since I'm almost at 512 characters, I'm going to ramble on for another minute in this comment, and then, without further adue, present you with a valid XML feed.

Thanks, Mozilla. In all seriousness, I truly appreciate the user-centric focus you take with your browser. The fact that I have a custom-made Get Firefox logo on my navbar, which is the one and only image/banner/link on my site that even remotely resembles an advertisement, should alone speak volumes of this. However, when such a large number of your own users come forward to ask that you fix an issue - not even remove it, just make it optional - please consider actually listening to what they say rather than responding with the same "our way is better than yours" comments over and over.

And while we're on the topic, please, for the love of all that is holy, fix this damn Tab/Window close bug. Once again, with so many of your own users reporting it as a problem (again, count the number of pro vs. con comments, as well as the number of duplicate bugs posted), consider the fact that the few of you who implemented this change just may be wrong. And once again, people are simple asking for an option here - not to completely do away with it, since some people seem to prefer this behavior, but make it optional for those that don't. At the very least, consider using the patch that I've already written.

Ok, that's enough ranting for now. I feel much better. :-)