Snowl is a prototype application from Mozilla Labs that tries to bring various communication plattforms under one roof. The early prototype currently supports Twitter and RSS News Feeds but the developers already mentioned other communication platforms like Facebook, Google Talk or AIM.
The first question that obviously comes to mind is how Snowl is any different from current RSS News Feed Readers and the honest answer at this point has to be not much. Twitter is offering RSS News Feeds as well which means that any RSS Reader can currently display the same information that Mozilla Snowl can.
The only difference currently lies in the interface which provides two different view modes. The first reminds of desktop email clients like Thunderbird. It is divided into three different panes, on the left the RSS News Feeds, in the upper half the messages of the selected RSS News Feed and at the bottom half the selected message.
The second view mode is called River of Messages which looks pretty much like a newspaper when the messages are expanded. That mode looks pretty fine to receive a quick overview of new items that have been added.
Snowl does have a few of the problems that I experienced with the Live Bookmarks setting in Firefox. Importing RSS News Feeds virtually slows down the system to a halt. That’s extremely frustrating if you import hundreds of feeds from an OPML file. The same happens if you update the feeds, something that you will never experience in external applications or online services like Google Reader.
That alone is reason enough for me to not use Mozilla Snowl on a regular basis. The developers have some interesting plans for Snowl. They want to add true two-way communication capabilities, for example reading and writing Twitter messages.
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still not understand why mozilla doesn’t put efforts on integrating thunderbird, RSS and chat in firefox in a better way than SeaMonkey, just like Opera does…Seamonkey is not as powerful as firefox or Opera, and feed reading of firefox is nothing if compared to how much comfortable is doing it in Opera
downloaded TOR using internet explorer, but cannot launch it
hello, i am user from China. as you know, internet are often blocked. in fact, i cannot open the ADDON page using firefox. i wonder if the firefox Chinese simplified version is already filtered by the government or not. I suspect that either the company or the government, or jointly block some of firefox function from properly running here. i was able to download TOR using internet explorer. but could not run it. i think the extension is not a normal EXE and the windows do not know what to do with it. well. in any case, can you tell me how to open TOR? i would appreciate using TOR properly to surf online comfortably and safely. Thank you
Hello, this is another sign that China blocked mozilla. the following message returns when i tried to post this question on mozilla’s support questions. look, it said “incorrect thread”. Fuck the government in China. and Fuck those who submit to that government.
错误
Incorrect thread
lion