Brief
New features and improvements:
- Integration with the new bookmarks system in Firefox 3: starred items are now simply bookmarks.
The star in the left corner of an item brings up Edit Bookmark panel, just like the one in the Location Bar.
You can browse and search items by their tags.
- Improved performance. Switching pages and deleting items is a lot faster.
- Optimized checking feeds for updates, doesn't lock up Firefox anymore.
- Searching faster, matches only full words and provides Google-like syntax, for example: mozilla OR "firefox extension" -tabs.
- Search matches are highlighted in the feed content.
- New way of customizing appearance of feeds. You no longer have to provide a complete replacement for the
default CSS style, instead you can add rules in addition to the default style. There is a simple built-in
editor available in the Options window.
- A feed-specific setting not to mark changed items back as unread.
- Reorganized Options window.
- Option to sort oldest items first in unread view.
- Tweaks to the default style of feeds.
- Option to always highlight the current item, so that you can edit it using keyboard shortcuts.
- Spacebar/backspace always scroll to the next/previous item.
- Shortucts to show next/previous item (K/J) were swapped to match the common layout among most applications.
- You can hold Ctrl when clicking "Mark all items as read" button to mark only the current page.
- When a web page is displayed, clicking the currently selected feed in the sidebar restores the feed view.
- Keyboard shortcut to open Brief: Ctrl + Shift + A.
- The feed-specific setting to specify the maximum number of stored items was removed. The global option is
still available. See this topic for background.
- When an item has no title, the URL is shown as the title.
- Network security dialogs, for example warnings about invalid certificates, are suppressed to avoid annoying
users. This also includes authentication prompts, so if you subscribe to authenticated feeds, you can flip
a hidden preference to restore the old behaviour: extensions.brief.update.suppressSecurityDialogs.
- Progress bar is always shown when checking feeds for updates, instead of only when it was manually initiated by the user.
- Spinbuttons (these tiny arrows) were added to textboxes in options for entering numbers.
- Smooth scrolling was tweaked, so that it doesn't take too much time to scroll past long items.
Fixed bugs:
- Brief works better with NoScript extension. You no longer have to add all file:// URLs to the whitelist, Brief has its own resource:// URL.
- OPML importing was significantly improved. Brief handles more kinds of files and deals with errors better (thanks to DG for providing samples of various problematic OMPL files).
- Exceptions in the Error Console when the sidebar is hidden.
- Double-clicking Mark Read button in the Unread view results in infinite stream of exceptions in the Error Console (thanks to Ngamer for reporting)
- After opening an item in unread view and then going back, marking items as read doesn't work anymore
- Firefox's shortcut for switching tabs (Ctrl+Tab) accidentally toggles highlighting of the current item.
- In headlines view, when unfolding an item taller than the window height, the scroll position lines up with the bottom of the item instead of the top
- Sometimes feeds are skipped when updating multiple feeds.
- Feed content flickers when refreshed.
- Favicons in the list of feeds sometimes are mixed up.
- Contents of items are now a displayed like any normal elements in web pages, which fixes various things
that didn't with the special way Brief used to serve the contents. This includes tooltips (floating titles
of elements), Firefox extensions that interact with contents of web pages, and potentially some other stuff.
New features and improvements:
- Brief is now compatible with Firefox 3 Beta 1 and 2.
- Support for exporting and importing OPML (a format for exchanging feeds). Thanks to Christopher Finke, the author of OPML Support extension.
- Option to automatically mark items as read when the are viewed.
- The control to show/hide the list of feeds was moved to the main toolbar for better discoverability.
- The default style is a little more shiny and colorful.
- Clicking on the feed's header in the feed content opens the website in a new tab instead of the current one.
Fixed bugs:
- Mac OS X: some issues with the Options window and various visual glitches.
- List of feeds is empty when opening Brief after it was closed with the sidebar hidden.
Fixed bugs:
- Items are not expired according to the user's storing preferences.
Fixed bugs:
- Migration from 0.8 sometimes fails, which causes various problems.
Fixed bugs:
- After bringing up the context menu in the sidebar, clicking on feeds doesn't display them
New features and improvements:
- Rearranged buttons on the main toolbar.
- Item date displayed in a more friendly format - use Today, Yesterday, days of the week etc.
- Added is label indicating when an item was changed (for example when a blog post was edited). Additionally, such item is marked back as unread.
- Show a short description when a view is empty instead of just a blank page.
- Put a button in options to show keyboard shortcuts in order to make them more discoverable.
- Make keyboard shortcuts customizable by extensions like keyconfig. This doesn't include Backspace, Space, and Tab which therefore can be disabled by a hidden pref extension.brief.assumeStandardKeys.
- Added Next/Previous buttons to the feed properties window.
- Changes to the appearance of feeds.
- Revamped headlines view.
- Added accesskeys to Brief's windows where necessary.
- List of keyboard shortcuts is now localizable.
- Changed naming of a few things and improved wording in various places.
- Again improved performance of displaying feeds, especially with large amounts of items
Fixed bugs:
- Brief's favicon sometimes isn't shown on the tab.
- Scroll position and selected entry aren't remembered when refreshing the view.
- Sorting, removing, or adding many Live Bookmarks at once aren't reflected in the sidebar.
- When a feed is deleted, the feed content view is not refreshed immediately and it may still contain some items from the deleted feed.
- When home folder is removed from bookmarks, the sidebar isn't emptied.
- Regression: sidebar has too big minimum width.
- Brief sometimes causes Firefox take a very long time to shut down. Fixed by disabling automatic compacting of the database. User may now choose to compact it when emptying Trash folder.
- List of shortcut keys is cut off if window is too small.
- "About Brief" window is too tall.
- Brief's toolbarbutton appears in popup windows when the mini-location bar is shown.
- The Unread folder is not selected in the sidebar when opening Brief, even though it is displayed in the content area.
- Favicon is not shown on then tab when Brief is opened as the homepage.
- Some other minor bugs.
New features and improvements:
- Support for keyboard navigation and other shortcuts - you can press ? to see the list of shortcuts at any time.
- Searchbar now searches for separate words instead of the whole string.
- When newer versions of entries are available (e.g. when blog posts are edited), Brief updates the entries.
- Pressing Escape clears the searchbox and ends the search.
- Improve the way the Live Bookmarks folder is chosen on the first run, by allowing to select it straight from the sidebar.
Fixed bugs:
- Toolbar button doesn't stay pressed when opening Brief in a new tab.
- Entries are sometimes duplicated when updating feeds.
- Added a hidden preference extensions.brief.database.disableCompacting to disable compacting of the database (for people with extremely large amounts of entries compacting caused Firefox to take ages to shut down).
- Other minor bugfixes.
New features:
- Arrows next to folders in the sidebar to fold and expand their content
- Delete feed, Delete Folder, and Update Folder items in the sidebar context menu
- Load the Unread view as the homepage when opening Brief
- Show progress of checking for updates next to the statusbar icon (if Brief isn't open)
- An option to display authors of entries
- When checking for updates is in progress, show a button to stop
- Mark All Feeds As Read in the statusbar icon context menu
- An option to display only headlines of the entries while making it easy to view them in full
- Button in the options window to empty all feeds
- Feed Properties dialog enabling per-feed preferences such as how often to check for updates and how many entries to remember
Changes and improvements:
- Improve performance, especially with a large number of entries (turn on database indexing, optimize refreshing of the feed content display)
- When the user adds, modifies, or deletes Live Bookmarks, reflect the changes immediately (previously Brief had be reopened to pick up the changes)
- Always open Brief in the current tab if it's blank
- When opening entries, respect the Firefox's preferences whether to open links in new tabs or new windows
- Improved default style of the feed content view
- Ability to pick the unit (minutes/hours/days) of how often to check for updates
Fixed bugs:
- The context menu in the feed content view is broken, doesn't include the right items for the element which was clicked
- Entry titles sometimes contain garbage like &# 8217; (HTML entities not resolved)
- Unpressing the Brief's button doesn't close Brief when the tab bar is hidden
- Feeds keep loading indefinitely when the server isn't responding
- Very rarely the Brief's button doesn't look pressed even though Brief is open
- MediaWiki feeds don't work very well, many entries aren't downloaded
- Unread feeds in the tooltip are listed in a different order than in the sidebar
New features:
- Ability to limit number of stored entries per feed.
- Context menu option to delete all entries from a feed or a folder.
- Option in the context menu to restore all trashed entries.
- A bar on the left edge of the screen allowing to toggle the sidebar.
- Favicon is shown on the Brief's tab.
- When viewing many feeds at once, labels are shown telling from which feed each entry comes.
- Tooltips for the toolbar button and the status icon which show detailed information about the unread feeds.
- Preference whether double-clicking should an entry should mark it as read.
- Preference to open entry links in new tabs.
- Hidden preference to specify the fetch delay (normally you shouldn't need to touch this).
Changes and improvements:
- Autoupdate interval is now counted since last update, not since startup.
- Manually updating all feeds resets the autoupdate timer.
- Removed the drop-down menu in feed entries in favour of separate buttons.
- The header in the feed view is now shown also when displaying folders.
- Rearranged the options window to accommodate the new preferences.
- When entries are removed from the feed view refreshing is much smoother.
Fixed bugs:
- "Mark currently viewed entries as read" button affects all the entries, not only the filtered ones, when performing a search.
- "Invalid Date" sometimes shown as the entry date.
- Feed view sometimes scrolls to the top when marking entry as read or starring it.
- Folders in the feed list don't retain the open/closed state.
- If entry title contains HTML tags then they are displayed in plain text as part of it.
- Feed view sometimes fails to load when there are non-ASCII characters in the user's profile path.
- Brief does not work on Mac OS X - attempting to update feeds fails.
- Feed list is empty when Brief is opened as the homepage.
- Fixed an error with feeds sometimes failing to display.
- Fixed an issue with Location Bar rendered unusable at first start after installing Brief.
Brief 0.5
25 February 2007 - first public release
