RSS Ticker

RSS Ticker is a free Firefox extension that displays your subscribed RSS feeds in a scrolling toolbar. It's easy to use, customizable, and an effective way of staying on top of things without cutting away from your browsing.

We installed RSS Ticker and restarted Firefox. RSS Ticker began scrolling preloaded headlines along the bottom of our browser window. A pop-up notified us that our saved RSS feeds would appear shortly and also offered a link to instructions for adding new feeds, which is as easy as saving a page in Live Bookmarks. We browsed to some news sites and a few others that update fairly frequently and added them to RSS Ticker's queue. Hovering the cursor over any item in the scrolling tape paused the toolbar and produced a small pop-up with a concise summary and a Web link; clicking on an entry opened its page in Firefox. We accessed RSS Ticker's tabbed options dialog via Firefox's add-ons manager page. These configured General settings like placement, Advanced settings such as ticker speed and update frequency, and the Context Menu, which is what appears in the menu that pops up when you right-click RSS Ticker's toolbar. Two additional entries, Feeds and Feature Feeds, let us view and manage our RSS feeds as well as subscribe to some free feeds that help pay some bills (though certainly there are worse ways to waste time than reading Conan's tweets). We moved the toolbar up underneath the Bookmarks Toolbar and slowed the scrolling speed a bit, too.

RSS Ticker is a neat addition to Firefox, one that has the potential to stick around a while. If you're the sort who is always checking up on news, sports scores, and other changing content, try it; we think you'll like it.