Firefox live bookmarks are a handy way to stay on top of the latest posts from your favourite websites (cough, cough), without needing to use a dedicated feed reading app or service like Feedly.
They will certainly help you stay on top of the waffle we serve up on a daily basis, that’s for sure ;)
If you’re using Google Chrome we have a neat, open-source, and resource efficient Chrome extension available to install from the Chrome Web Store.
We initially built a Firefox add-on so that the 43% of you who don’t use Chrome/ium-based browsers could enjoy a similar experience to their Chrome cohorts.
As embarrassing as it is to say this, only about 50 people installed our Firefox add-on. When some Firefox changes broke it about 12 months ago we decided the effort in fixing it wasn’t worth it and it removed the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons page.
Part of the failure of out add-on was obvious: Firefox lets you create live-bookmarks from any website with an RSS feed.
It doesn’t matter which site you want to add a live bookmark for; here’s how to add live bookmarks in Firefox (and Firefox-based) browsers. The feature works on the desktop version of Mozilla Firefox on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD.
Add Live Bookmark in Firefox
The fastest way to create a live bookmark is to open the RSS feed of a blog, site or publication in a new tab directly. This will present you with a ‘Subscribe Now’ button so that you can add it as a live bookmark.
If you’re not sure of the RSS feed for a particular (and they’re not always obvious) it can be easier to go the long way around:
With Firefox open and in focus:
- Click the ‘Bookmarks’ option in the menu bar
- Click ‘Subscribe to This Page’
- If you have a choice of RSS feeds pick you want to subscribe to
- Click ‘Subscribe Now’ on the page that opens
A small box will appear where you can edit the name of your Live Bookmark and choose the folder to save it in. By default, Firefox will save live bookmarks to the Bookmarks Toolbar.
That’s it.
Anytime you open a live bookmark it will automatically refresh to fetch the latest N updates. Our feed, for example, shows the most recent 18 posts. Other feeds may show a different number of items, some less, some more.
To remove a live bookmark from the Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar you need to right click on it and select ‘delete’.