Vasanth Dharmaraj’s Blog

The Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 is out. One of the new features is choosing the default feed reader. You can choose from some web based feed readers like Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo… This feature provides a tight integration of you feed reader with Firefox. For instance if you click the feed icon in the URL field of Firefox, you will be directly be taken to the subscribe page of your feed reader. Or if you are looking at a RSS/Atom feed you see something like this:

I like this integration but unfortunately my feed reader NewsAlloy is not in the list. But a bit of googling revealed that it is easy to add new feed readers to Firefox. Here are the steps:

1. Open a new Tab/Window and type ‘about:config‘.
2. In the filter box type ‘browser.contentHandlers‘.
3. You will see a bunch of entries like ‘browser.contentHandlers.#.type‘. These are the properties which define the feed readers appearing in the options screen you see above.
4. To add NewsAlloy to the list you have to add three new string properties to the config. You can add a property by right clicking and choose New>String. Two dialog boxes will pop up one after the other asking for the name-value pair. Enter the following pairs:
   a. Name: browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title Value: NewsAlloy
    b. Name: browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type Value: application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
   c. Name: browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri Value: http://www.newsalloy.com/?act=default&pop=1&rss=%s
Note: Replace the number 3 in the above with a number higher than the ones you find in the filtered list.

5. Restart the browser and go to Tools>Options and click on ‘Choose Feed Reader…‘ button and you will now see NewsAlloy with its Icon and all.

You can replace the url in 4b with your favorite feed reader’s subscribe url. The %s is where Firefox will put the feed url. Have fun!