Snowl 0.3pre1, the first preview release of the next version of Snowl (the messaging-in-the-browser experiment), is now available.This version includes a bunch of “under the hood” work to enable future improvements to the interface and functionality. It also includes initial implementations of some of those improvements.

In particular, it more closely integrates Snowl into Firefox’s existing feed functionality with a revamped river view that replaces Firefox’s feed preview page. When you press the feed button () in Firefox’s location bar, Snowl now subscribes you to the feed and shows it to you in the river view:

If you decide you don’t want to subscribe to the feed after all, unsubscribing from it is easy: just press the Undo button in the notification bar at the top of the page. If you’d rather subscribe to the feed using a different feed reader, you can still do that: just select the reader from the menu in the notification bar.

If the site provides multiple feeds, Snowl subscribes you to all of them. However, if it detects duplicate feeds–like an Atom feed and an RSS one–it only subscribes you to one.

The river view also shows you feeds available in other open tabs, to make the feeds provided by the websites you are browsing more discoverable.

You can subscribe to those feeds with a single click on their star icons, just as with bookmarks.

alta88 has also made a number of improvements to the list view, including the ability to delete messages and the ability to search collections.

Try out Snowl 0.3pre1 and let us know what you think! But don’t forget that this is a preview release of a labs experiment, not a stable release of 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