Subject: Firefox feed autodiscovery

From: "James Holderness" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 16:54:29 -0000

I'm not sure if this is something new to version 1.5 or I just didn't notice 
before, but when a web page has multiple rel="alternate" links of different 
feed types, Firefox's autodiscovery feature only shows one of them. What's 
most interesting, though, is that if there's an Atom feed as well as an RSS 
feed, they always choose the Atom feed even if the RSS feed comes first.

For example Microsoft's Team RSS Blog [1] has links that look something like 
this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
  title="RSS" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/rss.aspx" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
  title="ATOM" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/atom.aspx" />

Yet if you click on Firefox's subscribe button it automatically subscribes 
you to their (broken) Atom feed despite the RSS feed being listed first.

I understand the argument about only showing one feed when a site supports 
different types because most users wouldn't know how to choose between the 
two. I also understand their choice of Atom above RSS since for the most 
part Atom probably produces better results. Unfortunately there are still 
many cases when it's preferable to choose RSS above Atom.

Not that I'm complaining really. I can still do a view source when I 
absolutely have to use RSS (like say on LiveJournal). I just thought the 
list might find this interesting.

Regards
James

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/