We’re pleased to announce the release of Snowl 0.3, the third major release of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment. This release features closer integration with Firefox’s existing feed functionality and many improvements to the list view to make it easier to subscribe to and follow feeds.

When you click on the feed icon in Firefox’s location bar, Firefox normally shows you its feed preview page. If the page provides both RSS and Atom feeds, Firefox makes you pick between them first:

Snowl 0.3 replaces Firefox’s feed preview page with its river of news view, so once you click on the feed icon, you’ve subscribed to the feed in Snowl and can start following it immediately. It also detects identical RSS and Atom feeds and doesn’t make you pick between them.

The list view improvements include support for deleting messages, unread message counts, custom collections that you can define yourself, and collection filtering:

Try out Snowl 0.3 and let us know what you think! But don’t forget that this is a labs experiment, not a finished product, and there are bound to be bugs and other issues.

Post your thoughts on Snowl to the discussion group, and file bug reports on the problems you encounter. Or join us for discussion in the #labs IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. And if you’re interesting in hacking on Snowl, check out the source code.

- Myk Melez on behalf of the Snowl team