I get to love Mozilla Firebird more and more each time I use it. Today I discovered that in the properties for any bookmark you can specify a schedule for Firebird to keep watch for updates to that page. When it spots that the page has changed, Firebird will notify you by your choice of method.

That’s such an immensely useful feature – effectively taking one of the best features of RSS aggregators (being able to easily see when a site has updated) and integrating it right into the browser.

Another aspect of the browser I particularly like is it’s overall architecture choice – that of a light base framework browser that has a core of essential features, coupled with an extensibility layer. It’s the extensibility layer that enables anyone to develop their own features and bolt them straight into Firebird. They can even distribute them to others. Not only does this have the obvious advantage of users being able to pick and choose from bag-loads of goodies, but it also allows third-party services to develop browser extensions to integrate with their own products (such as BlogThis – although that’s not been developed by Blogger themselves, you see the principal).

What’s more (there’s more?) it means that if you don’t want all the crap, you don’t have to have it. The base browser is designed to be light on its feet. It has a perfectly respectable set of basic features (similar to Safari in a lot of ways), but nothing that bogs it down. What a cool cookie.

My site is designed using established standards to work in all browsers. Even so, I’m so impressed by this browser that I want to adorn my pages with:

This site is best viewed with: Mozilla Firebird.