With the recent landing of bug 302121, the RSS views now have a nice look to them. To take this a step farther, we should add filtering / sorting / searching to the view similar to Safari's view of feeds. I'll attach a screenshow showing its UI.

Should the searching/filtering be limited to the information found in the page? I got this working in a simple demo from a while back. (http://erik.eae.net/playground/) I could reuse some of that code for this.

I'm thinking it would be limited to the information that would be visible to the user if they were showing the full "Article length". Along with that should the article length adjust when searched text is found adjust to show all matching data? I guess what I'm trying to get at is trying to make the search find the records from what the user has already downloaded in the feed data and make the records that match the search obvious why they matched. The problem test case to avoid is say you searched for "firefox" and that was the last word in the content of the feed. So that word should be highlighted and visible to the user as they scrolled up and down the feedview display. The demo looks good. One item that Safari had that might be cool is several predefined regions of time to limit the results displayed (All, Today, Last Seven Days, This Month, Last Month).

This one filters based on the "description" attribute set on the article div Things that remain: 1. trim whitespace in the beginning? 2. Look in title as well 3. Hook up localized string. There should probably be "Search" string 4. Update css? 5. Animate? I have a pretty nice resize and fade animation for this but at the moment it has some bugs that needs to be fixed before showing this This does nothing to sorting. Maybe we should have an alternative bug for that?

Sorry for the last patch, my dos diff does not handle line endings correctly so I had to do some manual work and screwed it up

This patch does everything in the list above except the animation

I've still not managed to get cvs diff to ignore the invalid line endings in the CVS repository. The patch still works even though it makes it hard to see what actually changed.

It is too late. If this one fails as well I'll try tomorrow night again

I've been thinking more about this and I believet this should be marked as invalid since it overlaps with the inline search feature provided by default in Firefox. Although this is a neat feature it does not provide any real value.

There are several possible improvements that we could choose from in this issue: 1) Searching - Adding a searching box would likely compete with existing page searching and that I agree doesn't necessarily need to be added in an additional implementation view of the same functionality 2) Filtering on a feed - Say you're looking at a feed on web browsers that has like 50 articles and if you typed in firefox it would then only show the 10 articles that contained firefox in their title. This would be neat but can be achieved by doing a search to find the articles 3) Sorting by date / title / source / new (these are the options Safari uses) - This would be quite useful to provide an order to the results other than chronological 4) Time filtering - The other possibility that Safari shows is showing all articles, today's articles, yesterday, last 7 days, etc. While these are only one possible list of items that could be implemented to improve the sorting / searching / filtering, they do provide some good examples. The addition of feedview greatly improved the viewing of RSS feeds, but adding some additional actions to help users get what they want to see out of those feeds would be another vast improvement.

The look and feel is a bit rough. Remaining things: 1. Should it remember the date filter? Right now it is reset to All every time 2. The date filtering is not localized yet. I'm still having issues with the file formats so I'll try to do the remaing issues before attaching another patch.

Are there other thoughts on what's the maximum amount of improvement that can be brought to the feedview view? I've provided some comments, largely based on how Safari works, but would be interested to hear what others thing adds the most value so we can maximize the effectiveness of this enhancement.

The feed reader has been demoted in recent versions of Firefox, and we're unlikely to extend or expand on it.