My Little Corner of the Web

The Moleskin is the personal web site of Kelsey Ruger and is a collection of creative work, thoughts and lessons.

Firefox 2 Beta 2: Microsummaries

September 4th, 2006

Now that Firefox 2 Beta 2 is out I figure it’s probably stable enough for me to start looking at some of the new features in it. One of the cool new features that caught my eye is Microsummaries. Turns out that Microsummaries seem to actually be what live bookmarks should have been.
Microsummaries are regularly updated short summaries of a web page. When you bookmark a page that has a microsummary, you can choose to display the microsummary as the title of the bookmark. After that when the page changes the title will also change.

Why is it important?

For sites that have constantly changing data or featured items this is a great way to give up to date and accurate information about what is currently being displayed on the page, allowing a visitor to see what’s there before they visit the page. Probably more important – previous visitors will want to revisit after updates. What could you use this for?

  • The latest weather in your area – HOU: 80% Rain, 90 degrees
  • The latest word or quote – Dictionary.com: Extemporaneous
  • The latest scores – ESPN Football: Texas 24 – Ohio State 21, QTR3
  • Latest Blog Post – Themoleskin: Youtube killed the video star
  • The hot night spot – Nightlife.net - HOU: Chrome is the place to be tonight

How Does it Work

Basically a microsummary is an XML document called a microsummary generator that is linked in the <head> of your XHTML document. This generator defines the elements which elements in the parent XHTML document that contain the data to be displayed in the microsummary. This could be an <h1> or <div> with the id “newsummary� After your browser does all the work by revisiting the XHTML page to keep the microsummary up to date.

Can’t I can do that with an RSS feed?

Sure you can but RSS still hasn’t taken over the world yet. It’s the reason why I allow people to subscribe to receive my feed by e-mail. There are still a lot of people out there that use bookmarks to keep up with pages and Microsummaries allow you to deliver up to date information to those people as well.

Getting Started

The first thing you will have to do is install Firefox Beta 2. Right now it’s the only browser than supports microsummaries.

Comments for “Firefox 2 Beta 2: Microsummaries”

  • Grayson De Ritis

    September 6th, 2006

    I can’t stop lovin’ Firefox. I agree, the summaries are a definite improvement/evolution, from live bookmarks. I’m interested to dig into about:config this week and see what they have done to speed up the browser.

  • The Moleskin

    September 14th, 2006

    […] Update: With the new release of Firefox 2 coming up, maybe they could incorporate a signal for when a site is using Microsummaries. […]

  • Themoleskin

    October 10th, 2006

    […] The Mozilla Foundation has announced the availability of Firefox 2 (RC 2). I have talked about Microsummaries before but didn’t really have time to do a full review of the new browser or take a deeper look at the other new features. Ars Technica has a very good review of Firefox 2.0 RC2. It includes screenshot comparisons that illustrate the interface changes, changes in implementation of tabs and the new tab management features. It’s seems very stable at this point but be aware almost none of the popular extensions work right now. Code freeze for Firefox 2 RC3 is set for tomorrow. The final release of Firefox 2.0 is expected by the end of October (Tentatively October 24th). […]

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