Little things you may not have noticed in IE8: Part 6 – Authenticated RSS

  • Article

 

Authenticated RSS Feeds

image When we first released the Windows RSS platform a number of people asked us about authenticated feeds. As I said in those posts, it was a hard cut for IE7, but I’m really happy to see that it’s here for IE8 :)

To set up an authenticated feed, just subscribe to it, and then go to the properties for the feed (on the right in the feed view), and you’ll see the “settings” button for the User name and password. Click, fill in the details and go.

Of course, anything that uses the RSS platform will get this new feature for free, including the Feed Headlines gadget that ships with Vista, and Windows Live Mail. Outlook uses its own download engine, so this won’t help if you were trying to use Outlook.

Trivia o’ the day: One of the key drivers for making this work was the Web Slices feature. It turns out there are far more web pages behind authentication than there are feeds, and since Web Slices are implemented using the Windows RSS Platform, it was natural to implement support for authenticated feeds for all types of feeds.