It turned out that my favorite RSS add-on Brief for Firefox was not compatible with the release candidate 2. I tried to force compatibility which did not work either. Now here is the interesting information that might help you if you ran into a similar problem. If one of your add-ons is not compatible to the latest Firefox version you could visit the developer’s homepage to see if he did post a new version or a workaround.

It turned out that the developer was busy creating Brief beta versions, the latest on his homepage was Brief 1.2 beta 2 while the latest on the official Mozilla website was Brief 1.1. Brief 1.2 beta 2 is fully compatible to Firefox 3 and I was able to select my feeds and use the RSS Feed add-on ever since.

To sum it up. If you have an add-on that you need but that is not compatible try to force compatibility. If that is not working check the developers homepage for new versions that have not been posted on the official Mozilla website yet. It worked for me.

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Exporting my Netvibes RSS Feeds and importing them into Brief was a breeze. Both support the OPML format which was all I needed to make the switch. Brief adds a small icon to the Firefox status bar that displays the number of unread news of all your subscribed RSS Feeds. A mouse-over will list the websites that have new news items and the amount of items on each specific site but I’m not using that feature much.

I usually just click on the icon which loads an instance of Brief in a new tab. The left pane displays all of my subscribed RSS feeds and the right pane the feeds. By default only the unread news items are displayed in the right pane but it is possible to select a specific feed or folder instead.

Feeds can be marked as read which removes them from the right pane and moves the next news article to the top. If you are in a hurry you can mark all of them read or display only the headlines of the feeds for a faster overview.

A click on the headline of the news article loads the article on its original website in a new tab and marks the feed automatically as read. A click on a link in an article however only opens the link in a new tab.

Not everything is nice and shiny though. Brief seems to load old feeds from time to time and I have not discovered the pattern when it does that. It’s irritating if articles from last year pop up as new articles. This might be a glitch and it is happening rarely but it is still annoying.

Another aspect that I’m missing is a history function. It happens that I quickly hit the mark read button only to notice that the article sounded more interesting than I thought. I have to find the site and article in the site’s listing in the left pane then. A history function or undo last x actions would be really nice.

From what I’ve experienced so far I can say that Brief cut the time I’m reading and watching RSS Feeds in half. That’s pretty amazing if you ask me. Another nice effect of the switch from Netvibes to Brief is that I only need to click the RSS Feed icons to add the feed to my list of Feeds. I always had to copy and paste the url into Netvibes before.

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