The RSS experiment: Firefox
Welcome to the official first week of The Great RSS Experiment. I'm cheating a little bit this week; Firefox is my primary browser, and I've been using it as my RSS feed reader for months now. The real pain begins next week when I have to scrap it in favor of an entirely new reader. This is just the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make for you, my loyal readers.Although Firefox is a web browser and not an RSS reader, per se, it includes a feature called "Live Bookmarks" which allows you to bookmark RSS feeds. These pseudo-bookmarks are then updated on the fly and appear as folders containing the individual news items, blog entries, etc. The screenshot on the right show a folder full of Live Bookmarks, with one of them opened to the individual entries.
Usability: 2/4 
Each week, I'll rate the RSS reader I'm testing on both usability and features. I have to qualify the usability rating for Firefox. On the one hand, it's probably one of the easiest readers to use. You grab RSS feeds just like bookmarks and access them just as easily. Unfortunately, for the 90%+ of the population that doesn't use Firefox as a web browser, Live Bookmarks aren't a viable option. Also, while they work very well with auto-detection (the feed icon that pops up to the right of the URL), Live Bookmarks are not well supported by popular RSS delivery tools, such as Feedburner.
Features: 1/4 
Firefox's best feature as an RSS reader is that it's fast and easy to use. You don't have to open up another window and the feeds are virtually at your fingertips. Unfortunately, that's also its only feature. There is no support for customization and, worst of all, you can't track what you've read and haven't read.
Firefox Recap
This entire experiment really got started because of the limited capabilities of Live Bookmarks, so I have a hard time recommending them. If you already use Firefox as a browser and subscribe to just a handful of RSS feeds, then Live Bookmarks are probably a good bet. Serious RSS users will have to stay tuned for the rest of the experiment. Next week under the microscope: Google Reader.
