Podcast Detection: My Favorite Firefox 3 Feature
You may have noticed by now that I’m a big fan of Firefox 3. And congratulations to the Mozilla community for passing 8 million downloads in their first 24 hours! Amazing.
I’ve been holding off on talking about my favorite new Firefox feature because I wanted to wait until you all had Firefox 3. The new feature lets Firefox detect enclosures in RSS feeds and send them to your favorite audio or video podcasting client. This lets you click on an RSS feed and have it get sent to Miro if it’s video, iTunes if it’s audio, and a desktop news reader if it’s text.
The new feed preview pane sums it up. (Click to enlarge.)
This is my favorite feature, of course, because it makes for a much smoother connection from web browsing to subscribing in Miro. And maybe the best part is that it was developed for Firefox 3 by the Miro team! It’s a perfect example of how open-source organizations can work together to give everyone a better experience. Here’s developer Will Guaraldi’s writeup of the new feature.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Which theme is that in the screenshot?
June 18th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
standard osx theme with the bar set to small size icons
June 18th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Nice feature I’ll check it out. On another note, the “get started” page for Firefox 3 has a nice link to Miro check it out. http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/central/
June 21st, 2008 at 11:43 am
That is a very good feature idea, yes open source does work.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
This was a Firefox 2 already present feature.
Very usefull anyhow
June 29th, 2008 at 2:53 am
erixtekila: Actually, this feature wasn’t present in Firefox 2–Firefox 2 sent all podcasts to a single handler. Firefox 3 distinguishes between video, audio and other podcasts and allows you to associate a different application with each type.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:56 am
Sorry, I wasn’t aware of this distinguidation. Will try that…