What Is It?

A Firefox Add-on that provides a simple RSS Reader based on Firefox Live Bookmarks contained in any bookmarks folder.

Why Would You Want It?

Provides a quick and easy way to read your Firefox Live Bookmarks RSS feeds from within your favourite browser and make full use of Firefox tabbed browsing and other add-ons to read pages in tabs, save pages, save sessions, etc.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Displays Live Bookmarks in a simple interface

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Overcomes need for a separate RSS Reader
• Use Firefox features and add-ons with selected pages
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Sorting Feeds (Alphabetically)

(This can be overcome using another Firefox add-on - “Bookmark Sorting”)

More About What it Does in Detail:

Brief installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons Statusbars page:

Brief makes reading RSS feeds as easy as it gets. It is designed to have the right set of features to be both powerful and simple. Brief stores feeds on your disk and presents them on a seamless, interactive page.

Long Description

Easily mark articles as read and star the interesting ones. Browse your feeds anyway you want - view the unread or starred entries, display a single feed or a whole folder, show full entries or only their headlines. Quickly find a piece of news using full text search. Be notified when feeds are updated in the background and track the number of new entries using the status bar. Customize the Brief’s look by creating your own styles. Use keyboard shortcuts to faster navigate through the pile of news.

General Use of Brief

(Click on pictures to enlarge where necessary)

Once installed it displays a toolbar button to the left end of the address box.

and an icon in the status bar showing the number of unread items and with a mouseover popup giving details

Left Clicking on the toolbar button or Status Bar Icon displays the main Brief Page and Feed Sidepanel. The first time you use Brief it will request which bookmarks folder you wish to use.

Right clicking on the Status Bar Icon allows you to update all feeds or mark all feeds as read.

Working across the controls to the left over the feed side panel you have:

allowing you to

• Refresh all feeds
• Search for text in a particular feed item (results are displayed in the reading pane)
• Open the Options dialog.

Over the main reading pane you have controls as follows:

• Mark All as Read
• Toggle Show Only Headlines or Full Feed Information
• Viewing Options Dropdown Menu
• Change Pages

There is also an icon to the left of the reading pane header which toggles the feeds sidebar on and off:

There is also the option to mark posts as Starred and display all these starred posts in the reading pane

Options Dialogs

The options are generally self explanatory from the screenshots

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

I find this a highly useful Firefox add-on that I use daily to go through the feeds I watch as a blogger and feeds that I am interested in generally. I use the options dialog to switch the folder of feeds but see “What Could Make it Better” below. I like to be able to watch my feeds in Firefox as I want to use several other Firefox features such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks, Scrapbook and Google Notebook to capture information and session manager to reopen sets of pages I am interested in.

I rate this as:

Simple - Does a Great Job

What Could Make it be Better?

Switch between different sets of feed folders by a simple dropdown or as a menu item in the Unread - Starred - Trash section at the top of the feeds sidebar

Undo “Mark as Read” in Unread section

Star option for all posts in a particular feed (manual or automatic as an option)

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Firefox Add-on - Statusbars - Get Your Statusbars Organized

Why I decided to Write This Blog

What are the Tags?

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Add-ons, Freeware, Pro Reviewer, Programs, Software, Utilities, Windows, Windows XP

Popularity: 27% [?]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:54 am and is filed under Firefox Add-ons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.