“Prasenjeet”:http://chaoszone.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_chaoszone_archive.html#106070718197986260 says that “Google Toolbar”:http://toolbar.google.com/popup_help-beta.html now offers popup blocking ability, so he finds himself using less and less of “Mozilla Firebird”:http://texturizer.net/firebird/index.html. But I am still sticking to Firebird. Read this article by Ben Goodger which explains “Why You Should Switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/
I am addicted to Tab-Browsing. You can also bookmark a set of tabs. So I have tabs with India related news sites, US related news sites, finance news etc.
Google search is integrated into the browser. So I don’t need a Google Toolbar. Besides this there are features like “Smart Keywords”, where by I can give a nickname to a bookmark. This enables me to type “newshopper” to take me to “Sulekha Newshopper”:http://www.sulekha.com/hopper.asp. To search something in a page, all you need is keep typing the string and the search is performed on the page. No more Ctrl-F required.
Now besides this, the weblog reader I use, “NewsMonster”:http://www.newsmonster.org/screenshots.html, runs under Mozilla as a sidebar.
Till IE has all these capabilities, I think I will use Firebird.
Update: Dan Gillmor has a column on “RSS Aggregators”:http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001285.shtml
Why I use Firebird
Published
How does NewsMonster work under IE? I presently use something called FeedReader, but would love something integrated with a browser.
Niraj, It does not work under IE. You need Netscape or Mozilla.
You can try
IE RSS Aggregator if you want something integrated with IE
http://www.managedcomponents.com/tools/ieRSSaggregator/ieRSSaggregator.htm
Or for a good looks simple aggregator, you could use FeedReader. I use Firebird 0.6.1 but am reluctant to shift from Feedreader to Newsmonster because of the effort involved. These guys haven’t started importing feeds between utils.
NewsMonster supports import/export of OPML if that’s what you implied.
Anyone who is brave enough can try out my aggregator – Intelli-Aggie (http://www.srijith.net/codes/index.shtml#ia)
As for Firebird whatever you say, firebird has a much bigger memory footprint than Opera. Given the fact that Opera has almost all the functionalities in Firebird (including Tabs, image blocking etc.) I come back to Opera time and again.
I started off with feedreader but it lacks few basic UI essentials, and after trying a couple of them, Syndirella was the winner by far. and supports all kinds of import/export to help to shift at will 😉
On the browser war front, be it IE/Moz/Opr all works as fine given individual tastes, but are we not forgetting that a need for popup stopper is always a welcome. (with ofcourse along with a whole lot of other apps for firwall protection, spam filtering, DNS caching et al. ) 🙂
Blog-of-the-week #2
The second in the series of blogs that I try and understand – to the best of my knowledge. The Blog-of-the-Week for the week ended 15th August 2003 is Varnam run by “JK”. I came across this blog courtesy Ritu…
Yup! Firebird is a killer browser. Currently I’m using Mozilla 1.4, which offers the same features too, just bcos I’ve found that the current version of Firebird has memory leak problems which slow down the machine after a while. But since Firebird is still in beta… I’m sure these bugs will be sorted out soon. 🙂
By the way, Google toolbar is available in Firebird too… so the inavailability of Google toolbar can’t be a reason not to use Firebird! 😉
Jk, i love the layout(& writings:)) you have on varnam. I should have gone with MT instead of Blogger.
Have you tried Avant or Crazy Browser ? I use Avant & recommend trying it. Word of caution: its a skin for IE so u r forever bound to IE’s frailities.
Cheers !
Jg, thanks. I used to be with Blogger. At some point, everything fell apart and i switched to MT.
The only reason I can’t discard IE completely is the fact that no other browser has the capability to show google page ranking. Google does not allow other people to incorporate that in their softwares…
Otherwise I am completely happy with Opera.