Blog - Firefox 2 and live titles
Firefox 2 and live titles
Firefox 2 is finally out, and it's packed with new features, just when IE 7 thought it had caught up with the competition! In fact, IE 7 won't even run on all of Microsoft's own OS's (mainly the still popular Win2K is completely left out) because they chose to use sneaky OS hooks that only themselves know about.
New features in Firefox 2 include:
- resuming your browsing session which allows to get back to where you were, including all form data (like a partially typed entry in your blog), in the event of a browser or computer crash
- inline spell checking in many languages, which I'm using right now, and it just works!
- live titles (more below)
- ... and more
Live titles are one of the least expected but very welcome innovations. They allow bookmarks to have a title that will change when the bookmarked site's content is updated. The browser does this by requesting a tiny file called a "microsummary".
Sounds perfect for blogs and online shops, and I've already enabled them on this site's blog index pages (this main blog, agenda and magazines) and also on Recohan's top and artist pages (telling about the last update, and the number of items in stock for an artist, respectively).
To use live titles you'll have to click the down arrow button (or push the down arrow key) in the bookmark name field when creating a new bookmark.
To add microsummaries to a Movable Type blog is quite easy. Simply create a new index template and make it build a file called microsummary.txt. The template's content should be something like the following:
<$MTBlogName$> - <MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryTitle$></MTEntries>
Then, add the following new <link/> to your main index template, right next to the one that points to your blog's feed.
<link rel="microsummary" href="<$MTBlogURL$>microsummary.txt" />
Rebuild your indexes and that's it!
For WordPress users, there's a plugin that takes care of it.
For more information about microsummaries, check microsummaries.org and the Microsummaries specification at Mozilla. There's also a list of microsummary-enabled Web sites.
Posted on October 25, 2006 at 12:13 | Tweet
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My bookmarks are online, but I've bookmarked you again, justt to see what happens :)
Posted by Erik on October 25, 2006 at 15:56
I hope the new Intenet Explorer will make more people Firefox users.
My IE7 has tabbed browsing disabled (I have switched it on in the options) and even uninstalling and installing the latest builds does not change that on my machine. My copy has the menu bar below(!) the new navigation bar and there is no way to change that (It should not have that menu bar at all...). Patrick, you are right - IE is linked to deep into the OS.
Good luck Firefox does it so much better.
Posted by Markus Kreisel on October 25, 2006 at 18:46
Live titles are great, and Firefox 3 will likely make use of live graphic titles (imagine a small bar graph or pie chart that continually updated). The problem with live titles is that they are so hard to explain. I created a short video to help people understand them at http://usefulvideo.blogspot.com/2007/02/little-known-firefox-feature-live.html
Posted by usefulvideo on February 11, 2007 at 02:11