I'm using FIreFox 1.0 on a Mac and when I link to the FR URL you provide I get a page with HTML and text with an error message at the top: "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."
What am I missing here?
In firefox 1.0pr (preview release) a RSS feed appears as a little icon on the bottom status bar (the bottom of the browser where you see the "loading" bar when you change pages). Click the little icon and you'll get an option to subscribe to the newsfeed. This works just like bookmarking and in fact the newsfeed is put into your bookmarks as a folder which when opened shows the latest news topics (live bookmarks -- always updated -- it's actually a pretty cool concept but not something that's very intuitive to new -- or old -- users).
Anyway click on the icon, subscribe to the feed, set where you want the feed to go in your bookmarks and when you put your mouse over the link you'll see the latest free republic stories :)
I guess I should also mention that you need to be on the news summary page ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/browse?ao=1 ) to see the icon :) Many pages which offer RSS feeds offer them in a way firefox can see, not all, but some is better than none, just keep checking the status bar now and again and pretty soon you'll have a pretty impressive collection of newsfeeds :)
You just answered your question. :)
The reason it shows up like it does in Firefox is because Firefox is not capable of formatting RSS newsfeeds. You'll need an RSS Newsfeed reader or Thunderbird. Internet Explorer, like Firefox, just show code in webpages when it doesn't recognize the HTML tag or doesn't know what to do with it.