Thunderbird::RSSRethink

Here are some ideas for improving feed handling in Thunderbird.

call them "feeds" instead of "RSS News & Blogs"

Feeds syndicate more than news and blogs these days, and they don't all use RSS. It would make sense to rename them to the more encompassing name, especially since that's the term used in other popular applications with feed handling capabilities (like Firefox).

use a different metaphor for feeds

The "account" metaphor doesn't make much sense for feeds, most of which are unrelated to each other, don't come from a single server, and don't require authentication. Feeds would be easier to use if you didn't have to create an account to subscribe to feeds but could simply maintain a list of "feed subscriptions."

allow content to do more in feeds

We should theoretically allow flash, java, etc. as well for feeds, if we intend to make them functionally useful in TB. And lots of posts/feeds have embedded videos or sounds, which is still not available in the very form we have TB today. This makes it kinda odd as you have to get it into browser to see that. We should give content in feeds additional privileges to load various kinds of content.

let user specify syndicated page instead of feed

One thing that bothers many users is to actually give the Feed URL. For example, it should be sufficient for the user to say http://www.mozilla.org and the wizard should give user a choice of what feed he wants to subscribe to, instead of user actually keying in http://www.mozillazine.org/atom.xml.

a way to subscribe to a story's comments

It'd be great if there was some way to specify for a given story that you'd like to subscribe to the feed of its comments. Many sites provide those feeds separately, and I'm not sure if there's good enough meta-data to detect them, but if not, perhaps Thunderbird could promulgate a standard for linking stories with their comment feeds.

We need a much better idea of "temporary" feeds - feeds you follow for a few days, then throw away.

support feed: style URLs as sent by Firefox

Thunderbird doesn't subscribe to feeds sent to it by Firefox because it doesn't recognize the format they are sent in. There's a Firefox bug to change the format when sending a feed to Thunderbird (bug 410496), but it would also be useful if Thunderbird recognized the format Firefox sends (i.e. feed: URLs), since then it would be compatible with other applications that also send that format.

stop using RDF to store information about feeds

RDF isn't an ideal format for storing information about feeds, and better storage formats are available (f.e. mozStorage, a.k.a. SQLite). Thunderbird should switch to using one of those instead.

allow configuring feeds individually

It should be possible to configure feeds individually, with per-feed settings for target folder, check interval, summary of full article, permissions for flash etc. It's a huge difference if you want to read a newspaper page or got something from an entertainment one.

allow grouping of feeds with group showing all items

It should be possible to group feeds in groups such that the folder representing the group, when selected, displays all the stories in its contained feeds.

allow caching of feed items (offline support)

Instead of downloading content from the network every time, cache feed content locally.

be less resource intensive

At the moment, my system slows down (flash is very slow) when Thunderbird checks the feeds. Perhaps it could use the idle service to reduce its impact on the system.

improved UI for feed reading (like Google Reader?)

With tab support in Tb3, this will be a new experience. It would be nice if the user can scroll through the list of feed item summaries.

a "check all my feeds now" button

It would be useful to have a button or other UI element(s) that let you refresh all your feeds immediately, just as you can refresh your mail accounts with the "Get All New Messages" option.

group feed items with similar content

Group feed items with similar content like feed items from different news sites.

an easy way to place important feeds in primary folders

Sometimes a particular feed is very important, and you want to track its stories closely by having them appear in your Inbox or other primary folder. To do that today, you have to set up a message filter, which is a cumbersome power user task.

It would be useful when subscribing to a feed to be able to specify a folder where its stories should be placed (with a sensible default for the common case).

This also serves the secondary use case of wanting your feeds to be accessible from multiple computers (if you place stories into an IMAP folder and run Thunderbird on one computer most of the time).

better auto-management of unimportant feeds

Sometimes a set of feeds is not very important, and you don't want to keep stale stories or even keep track of whether or not you've read each one, you just want to occasionally look at the stories in those feeds and read the ones that interest you in the moment (the "river of news" use case).

Thunderbird has support for deleting more than a certain number of messages or messages older than a certain number of days, but it would be useful to be able to specify simply that Thunderbird should only keep "current" stories for particular feeds (i.e. delete stories once they disappear from the feed) and not track their read state.

load stories directly into the message pane

Story content is currently loaded into the message pane via a hack: the feed processor builds a message body consisting of an HTML page with an embedded iframe, and the embedded iframe loads the actual story. A second hack makes sure that the inner iframe is focused when you tab from the headers to the message pane, so you don't have to tab yet again before scrolling works. And a (hardcoded, I think) exemption to the preference for showing remote images ensures that the iframe displays even if remote images are turned off.

This architecture would be simpler and more robust (and save some space in the message store) if the feed processor were to store merely the URL of the story in the message headers (f.e. in an X-Remote-URL header), and the view were to then load that remote URL in the message pane when the user selects the story.

There might also be some interesting secondary use cases for "remote content" model when applied to email (f.e. bandwidth savings for mailing lists), although there would be a lot of issues to work out (graceful degradation, security, etc.).

support for writing blog posts and posting comments on stories

Feeds in Thunderbird are currently read-only, but the Atom Publishing Protocol lets feeds specify how to submit blog posts or make comments on a story. Support for that protocol (or other such protocols) would simplify the process of responding to stories and make it easier for bloggers to write blog posts using the same familiar interface they use to write email messages.

switch to the feed processor integrated into the Mozilla platform

Since the feed feature was introduced in Thunderbird, Mozilla has acquired a more robust and better tested feed processor. Using that one would likely fix some feed parsing bugs and allow Thunderbird to take advantage of the shared effort to improve that processor.

allow tagging of feeds

Tagging bookmarks in Firefox's places is a great way to organise bookmarks, so why not introduce something similar for Thunderbirds feeds and feed items?