One of the areas of focus for us for Firefox 2 is Feed Handling. With this release we are seeking to make feeds more useful to more users, and along the way to that goal improve on some of the shortcomings of Firefox 1.x. My plans are outlined in this newsgroup posting.

What this post is about however is not about UI design but about implementation. This has been a very interesting journey so far, and I�ve learned a lot about our networking APIs in the process. Thanks much to darin, bz and biesi for the help.

Here I�m going to focus on the first of two interesting aspects of the requirements described in my newsgroup posting: showing a display page when feed links are loaded.

Towards the end of Firefox 1.5, a prototype feed pretty printer was landed. It had very many problems, and was removed. The solution was a hack � it observed every page load and tried to guess if the content was a feed or not. It guessed wrong many times because of the various types feeds are (incorrectly) served as, was jarring to use (since it appeared only after the feed document had initially loaded and potentially displayed some content to the user) and had many issues.

For Firefox 2, I wanted to approach this from a different angle. I wanted to integrate this well, using the APIs exposed by our system, for clean code, but also to prove that it could be done.