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Microsummaries - a new feature in Firefox 2

Ever felt that the title of bookmarks should be more lively, just like the pages themselves? are just that. I just hit upon this wonderful feature when I was reading my feeds. The idea behind Micro...

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Historical Content: This post was published more than 3 years ago and has been preserved for historical reference. Some information may be outdated, and it reflects my understanding of the technology at the time of writing.

Ever felt that the title of bookmarks should be more lively, just like the pages themselves? Microsummaries are just that.

I just hit upon this wonderful feature when I was reading my feeds.

The idea behind Microsummaries is to have some service in the browser periodically fetch the most important content in a page and then use this as the page title.

Some places where this is useful is stock quotes, front page news stories etc.

Here’s a screenshot:

I tried to create a Summary bookmark, which fetches the most recent bookmarks from the del.icio.us RSS feed. Although I expected it to work, it didn’t. :( Firebug showed an exception everytime the back-end service was called. The browser is still in the Alpha release, so I am pretty confident the feature will be better when the browser is released.

There are a host of other new features in the next version of Firefox, but what I am specially interested in, is the Places system of bookmarking (scheduled to be released with version 3).

Bookmarking is indeed undergoing a revolution in the way they are used in the browser!