Firefox 2 now has support for external RSS subscriptions instead of stupid Live Bookmarks. This means I can use my favorite reader Netvibes whenever I see the happy little orange icon in my address bar.

Netvibes is not one of the default RSS subscription engines, but this post includes a one-click update that couldn't be simpler.

I also dig the new notification style that just kind of appears at the top of the viewport. I know pop-up blocking and plug-in notifications have been appearing in this space for a while now, but I like this a lot better than an alert window.

Firefox has supported RSS since (I think) version 1.0, but this allows me to consume RSS in exactly the way I like. Why is this important? If I don't read feeds at all, the old school Live Bookmarks feature at least lets me know they exist, and lets me check them out if I am a bookmark whore. Firefox also provides 3 default choices to subscribe, being Bloglines, My Yahoo, and Google Reader; arguably the 3 most popular feed readers, and 3 of my least favorites. Because I know that Mozilla makes money by all sorts of content partnerships, I can imagine that they somehow got sponsored to include these three, and not any others.

Another lowered barrier to entry is the way the browser "skins" unskinned RSS, instead of displying raw XML. NO web browser should display raw XML, but there should be a developer hack to override the default, always.

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista will have support for RSS. Hooray. Sadly, not for podcasts or netcasts, boo. More on this later.

Oh, and View Source doesn't exist in IE7. Why?