One of the latest features of the Firefox browser is what's called Live Bookmarks. (a Bookmark is basically the same thing as a Favourite in Internet Explorer) However these 'live' bookmarks are different from normal bookmarks and use RSS(Really Simple Syndication) feeds to generate links to frequently updated information. I'm not doing a really good job of explaining this but...

For example this blog now has an RSS feed (well, it's always had it, but there was no link to it on the pages). Now In Firefox when you go to this blog, you will see a little RSS symbol on the bottom right toolbar. Left click on the symbol, and a little text block will appear saying: Subscribe to 'lucascosti.com - Blog'. Click this and FireFox will ask you where to save the bookmark. Press OK.

Now go to the Bookmarks menu, move your mouse over the 'lucascosti.com -Blog' and a list will appear of the titles of the most recent 10 blog entries that i've made.

Right now i've got live bookmarks of various people's blogs that i know (e.g. Andrew's newly created one). The live bookmark allows me to see the title of Andrew's most recent blog entries, and thus I can decide if I have already read the most recent one and don't need to actually go to the site.

This extra functionality of this browser is just another way Firefox is so much better than IE (and Firefox is still only a beta (pre-release) version!). When you think about it, Microsoft has really had the dominance in the web browser market for the past 7 or so years, but in all that time (other than the small changes included in XP SP2) they have not really done anything to improve the usefulness of IE.

Past few days have been pretty busy. Stayed up the last 2 nights till around midnight creating the tutorials for the help documentation for the COMP3804 program. Worked as well tonight. I'm planning on going into uni tomorrow to hopefully finish off those tutorials.