Eshin Direct

Adding netvibes to Firefox

It is a little annoying that netvibes hasn’t made the grade and has been excluded from Firefox’s default set of web-based browsers that you can subscribe to using Live Bookmarks. For netvibes users, there are two methods for adding feeds to netvibes easily in Firefox – install the Official netvibes Add-on for Firefox or tinker with the about:config file in Firefox.

Option 1 – Official netvibes Add-On for Firefox

The first option is the Official Netvibes add-on for Firefox provided by netvibes themselves and pretty much does what you would expect. You are able to publish both to your public universe and your private netvibes through the use of two buttons.

What is cool about this add-on is that if there is a tab with Netvibes already open, it looks for that tab to add in the new feed rather than opening it on the tab that you are on.This is useful if you want to stay on the original page for whatever reason or if you are prone to bulk-add feeds where you suddenly end up with a whole row of netvibes tabs. Also, it ensures that all your feeds are added and are visible since netvibes can be lagged in updating your work area with new feeds if they are added in multiple tabs (and sometimes they don’t even arrive!).

Option 2 – Modify about:config

The second option is to play around with about:config in Firefox. Although this looks quite technical and Firefox displays an idiot-proof tongue-in-cheek disclaimer before you can play with it, it is really rather simple.

Modifying about:config will add netvibes to your Live Bookmarks so that when you browse to a page with a feed, it automagically displays an RSS icon in your address bar which will let your subscribe with your feed reader service of preference.

Here is how to add netvibes to Firefox (via What’s the Next Action):

1. Open a new tab in Firefox and type in about:config in the address bar.
2. In the filter input box at the top, type in contentHandlers and press enter.
3. This brings up the default services used by Firefox (e.g. Bloglines, Google, Yahoo!). We want to add Netvibes to this. As you can see, this is in a particular order:
   • browser.contentHandlers.types.#.title (tells Firefox what to call it)
   • browser.contentHandlers.types.#.type (tells Firefox what to do)
   • browser.contentHandlers.types.#.uri (tells Firefox where to go)

   # represents the incremental number for each service.

4. You will now need to add three new strings. To do this, right click in some whitespace and select New > String. In each of the following additions, you will need to replace # with the next highest number in the sequence (in most cases, if you haven’t played around with it before, this will be 6).
5. Add a new string with the Preference Name of browser.contentHandlers.types.#.title and then call it netvibes.
6. Do a similar for the string browser.contentHandlers.types.#.type and add its value as application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed.
7. Lastly, you want to add in the browser.contentHandlers.types.#.uri and set its value at http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=Yes.

You probably should check that everything is correct by typing in contentHandlers again in the filter. You should end up with something that looks like the following.

And when you finally click on the RSS icon in your address bar, Firefox should now include your netvibes as an option.

Conclusion

Personally, I think that the netvibes extension offers a slight advantage over adjusting the about:config file for the reason that it does search for an existing open Netvibes page. It makes subscribing to multiple feeds more manageable. The add-on takes 1 click while Live Bookmarks takes at least 3 clicks to add a feed to your netvibes.

What eventually would be nice would be a complete 1-click, fire-and-forget button for netvibes like Google’s Toolbar star, which adds your bookmarks instantly without needing to go the Google page where you are tempted to instantly manage where it goes and perhaps lose focus.