Mozilla Firefox has an interesting feature called Live Bookmarks, that lets you subscribe to websites RSS feeds as bookmarks. Your default Firefox Bookmarks include one such feed “Latest Headlines”. It’s quite easy to keep track of new updates on a website with Live Bookmarks.
Google Chrome lacks this feature, but we can get a very similar feature in Google Chrome, with an extension called RSS Live Links.
For those who like Firefox “Live Bookmarks”, this is a browser extension that provides a similar ability : you can read your feeds’ headlines directly from a menu-style pop-up without having to go to the home page or a specialized RSS Feed reader.
RSS Live Links Chrome Extension:
Once you Install the RSS Live Links extension in Google Chrome, like other extensions you would see a RSS Live Links button at the top right corner of your browser.
It has a built-in “feed detection” feature i.e. if the webpage you opened in the current tab of your browser has a RSS feed, Live Links would display those feeds for you. You can subscribe to the feed from here.
Once you subscribe to a few RSS Feeds, the RSS Live Links extension would show you the list of websites subscribed.
Just like Firefox Live Bookmarks, you can view these feeds in form of updating bookmarks in Chrome.
RSS Live Links Options:
The extension provides a number of options to customize the looks of the updates window. You can increase or decrease the pop-up height or width as well as choose the colors for different links. To access the options window, right-click on the Live Links button and click options.
You can also specify how often the feeds should be checked for updates, and if you need audio or visual notifications when a feed updates.
You can manually add subscriptions by clicking the “Add Subscriptions button at the bottom of the options screen.
RSS Live Links Extension Features:
- Automatic visual and audible notification of updates to subscribed feeds.
- Menu-style pop-up list of subscribed feeds, with visual distinction between new, unread, and read feeds.
- Click on a feed to see a list of its items, with visual distinction between new, unread, and read items.
- Configurable “visual distinction” options for each “seen-state”.
- Bulk open actions.
- Support for “real” Live Bookmarks (i.e. a bookmark folder for each feed with regularly updated contents).
Update: Keyboard shortcuts feature added -
- Right-arrow/Left-arrow to cycle through feeds (unseen, then unread, then normal – or press shift to just cycle through in normal order).
- Up/Down Arrow to cycle through items in a feed.
- Enter to open currently selected item.
RSS Live Links incorporates all features of Firefox Live Bookmarks and takes them a new level, by adding several new options to this feature. If you are used to the Live Bookmarks feature and would like to get in on Google Chrome, check out RSS Live Links.
Download RSS Live Links Extension.
