Disable the RSS Preview in Firefox 2

Posted: January 31st, 2007 | Author: edward | Filed under: OSX, out of doughnuts ramblings | 4 Comments »

Firefox 2′s new feature of handling RSS with a HTML Preview can be frustrating if you frequently need to see the raw content of an RSS feed.

To disable it and get Firefox 1.x’s behavior back, you can replace the FeedConverter.js file with this modified version. (This is for: Firefox 2.0.0.1) I know it’s terrible to put this here, but it’s such a pain for some of us that I’ll host it here for now for the lazy. Hopefully in a future version it’ll be made an option.
Just original version of the file that you need to overwrite is at /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/components/FeedConverter.js

If you aren’t feeling lazy or you want to edit it yourself, just take a look at line 196 in FeedConverter to disable the preview mechanism. Thankfully the Firefox developers do a great job commenting their code.  Look for the if block under the comment “show the feed page…” and change it from “if (result.doc && …” to “if (false && result.doc && …”.

Update (2-6-08): Just made the editing instructions a bit clearer.  Also as an alternative to mucking with Firefox code, take a look at Mihai’s proxy below in the comments.

4 Comments on “Disable the RSS Preview in Firefox 2”

  1. 1 Gavin Sharp said at 8:02 am on February 2nd, 2007:

    Instead of hacking Firefox components, why can’t you just use View Source function, or the view-source pseudo-protocol (e.g. view-source:http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml)?

  2. 2 edward said at 5:48 pm on February 3rd, 2007:

    I know it’s a miserable hack, but I’m very often examining feed contents while debugging. I’ll explain why later in a later post.

  3. 3 Mihai Parparita said at 3:23 pm on December 17th, 2007:

    I’ve been annoyed by this too, and I came up with a slightly different solution:

    http://blog.persistent.info/2007/10/feed-proxy-view-raw-rssatom-feed-data.html

    It retains the pretty-printing that Firefox 1.x used to do, but with the tradeoff that it proxies feed requests so it won’t work for authenticated or intranet ones.

    P.S. Hey Ed :)

  4. 4 Jason Wadsworth said at 3:45 pm on January 11th, 2008:

    That’s excellent. I was having this same problem the other day. Unfortunately “view source” doesn’t do the pretty-printing for you. It never occurred to me that I could just hack the JavaScript. Cheers!

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