Explorer and RSS: Welcome to last year

Abiding to their usual habit of feeding us just bits and pieces of information about Longhorn, Microsoft’s officials declared yesterday that the Internet Explorer embedded in the next OS to emerge from Redmond will include RSS technology.

The feature, which is already present in some of IE’s competitors (Mozilla and Firefox have been using it for some time) will permit the detection, display and subscription to streams of news transferred from some websites.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a method of transmitting and receiving streams of news and information online. Computer users can subscribe to the feeds in programs called newsreaders, or aggregators, and then the selected news and information is delivered automatically as it becomes available.

The main advantages include the ability to access customized news and information within a single on-screen pane. Most newsreader programs also issue an alert when a particular feed has new information, typically by putting the feed's name in bold, thus eliminating the need to visit each Web site individually to see if it has been updated.

RSS capabilities will first appear in the preliminary version of Longhorn, which is due out this summer. Longhorn is scheduled to be released in final form in time for the 2006 holidays. Microsoft declined to say whether any RSS features would be added to the new Internet Explorer 7 to be made available in advance of Longhorn for the current Windows XP.

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