By replacing it with only feedburner, some readers might not recognize it as a feed, and it wouldn’t be coming from your site but through feedreader, which means that once they register, your feed statistics would only be measured through feedreader, not necessarily by your blog stats, since they wouldn’t actually be “visiting” your site. Does that make sense?

You can do whatever works for you, I just hope I’m helping you understand a little more about how this works and that the WordPress developers did nothing wrong, and it was a choice your Theme designer made.

You might want to check out WordPress Feeds and Customizing WordPress Feeds in the WordPress Codex for specifics on how the WordPress Theme designer might have done what they did and what your options are.

I did switch to feedburner recently, so I switched all my RSS links to reflect that. Not sure of any problems with aggregators, but I use web-based feedreaders pretty exclusively. I can see the benefit of having the “feed://” style links automagically load RSS feeds straight into a desktop reader, but isn’t that confusing to the average user? I’m sure I’m not the first person to kick this around, but I still don’t get why it’s the default setting.

It looks like you have changed the link in your footer to load the feed in feedburner, which might cause some confusion with some feed readers.

If you have the full version of WordPress, you can put the feed wherever you want it in your WordPress Theme.

As for Firefox loading the feed, well, that’s what it does. It’s supposed to. A feed reader will find the feed and stick it in your feed list, if you activate the “search for feeds on this page” feature. Otherwise, if someone just clicks the link, then they will see the feed, either in Firefox or whatever feed reader is set as the default. Just like when you click on a .doc document, it loads Word in order to see the document.

As for the announcement about MercuryNewsPhoto – that’s just too exciting. Wow. Thanks for letting us know!