Read RSS news feeds in your web browser

To manage the feeds you subscribe to in IE7, you can use the Favourites Center ­ that’s the yellow star icon on the left-hand side of the toolbar. If you click this you’ll find you have access not just to your Favourites but also your History and Feeds, the latter illustrated by the orange RSS icon. To unsubscribe, you simply highlight a feed, right-click and select ‘delete’. This removes the feed and all its associated content from your browser.

In Firefox 3 feeds are referred to as ‘Live Bookmarks’ and are accessible via the normal Bookmarks toolbar. Firefox goes one step further in helping you detect feeds by displaying the orange RSS icon in the browser’s address bar whenever a feed is detected. So you can simply click on this icon to subscribe, just as you would to add the site to your bookmarks. In this case, the new feed appears in your Bookmarks toolbar, where clicking on the shortcut will open a dropdown menu of all the available content from that site. Again, to unsubscribe, simply right-click and delete the feed.

Some sites are rather poorly designed and do not activate the tool that makes IE7 and Firefox display when feeds are available. In that case, you’ll often find a link on the site’s home page to click, displaying either the RSS logo or the word RSS.

RSS feeds cost nothing and can get you ahead of other web users when looking for the best deals, travel offers, or tickets to a wide range of events. Check your favourite websites to see if they offer a feed.

Add an RSS feed to Internet Explorer 7
1 We’ll use the Computeractive RSS feed as an example. Go to our RSS feed page, either by clicking the orange RSS box on the home page, or go straight to www.computeractive.co.uk/about/rss. Then select the ‘General’ feed.

2 This takes you through to the actual feed itself, and shows you how it appears in your web browser. To subscribe, simply click on the ‘Subscribe to this feed’ link at the top of the page.

3 To view your feeds, click on the ‘Favourites’ star icon in the toolbar of your browser. This gives access to your Favourites, History and subscribed Feeds. You should now see a new link to the most recent articles from Computeractive.