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Tiger Tips: What to Do if Safari RSS Stops Working

Safari IconSo, sometime Friday, Safari RSS stopped working for me. I have no idea why. I tried emptying the cache, going into Safari RSS prefs and clicking Remove Now to remove all the old articles. Nothing seemed to work. Today, I was chatting with Scott and he said, "Did you try deleting the prefs? That's the first thing I try with funky problems."

So, I closed Safari, went to ~/Library/Preferences/ and found com.apple.Safari.plist and dragged the file to the trash. Then, I relaunched Safari and re-enabled all the prefs that I like, like View—>Show Status Bar, and then went into Safari—>Preferences—>RSS and clicked the Remove Now button again. Ta-da! Safari RSS works again! Thanks, Scott!

Shortly after getting Safari RSS to work again, I realized that my Debug menu was missing, so I closed Safari, launched the Terminal and typed:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Hit return. Then relaunched Safari. There's the Debug menu. All is well, again.

I'm not looking forward to this becoming a regular thing. I hope Apple fixes whatever buggy bit is causing this. 

So, sometime Friday, Safari RSS stopped working for me. I have no idea why. I tried emptying the cache, going into Safari RSS prefs and...
 

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Stephen Rice

This may be a little off topic, but I am having trouble recognizing the usefulness of RSS reading capabilities, especially for sites such as TUAW. Your site seems organized in such a way that the RSS reader gives no additional benefit; all it does is dumb down the page, while leaving it in relatively the same format. What am I doing wrong? Why can I not make myself use RSS instead of simply going to the sites? Are there additional features that I am not taking advantage of?

May 23 2005 at 10:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nick Ratzloff

I keep gettting a reccurent problem that i can't figure out. My pages load with no pictures and when i delete my plist then everything is ok again for about a day then the pictures don't load again. Any ideas out there what my problem is? thanx

May 23 2005 at 3:20 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
amiga_tone

So far Safari has crashed on me twice since I've upgraded to 10.4.1. No particular reason, it just shuts down and prompts for the feedback details about what you were doing. And it's only the second time I've used it since upgrading - typically I use FireFox but I enjoy a change every now and then.

May 22 2005 at 7:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Brash Mandicoot

Whenever I run into a problem like this that I know will probably be solved by deleting the preferences file, I always try to check its permissions before deleting it. That can sometimes fix the problem without having to resort to deleting the file and resetting all your preferences

May 22 2005 at 4:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris Mcdowell

I only use firefox on the pc because it is the only thing that is closest to Safari for the PC. Never would I get Firefox for my mac.

May 22 2005 at 4:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Michael Martin

Under the debug menu there is the option to turn off rss support.. Are you sure you didn't click that? And Firefox stopps working all the time.

May 22 2005 at 4:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Matt

Or, instead of trashing all your prefs and having to go thru all that, you could just open the debug menu and hit "Turn Off RSS Support...". Safari will close, open it again, hit "Turn On RSS Support...", it'll close again, but RSS will be back, working, when you open it. Worked for me, and it's a lot less troublesome than trashing prefs all the time.

May 22 2005 at 3:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rob Knight

A corrupted plist can happen for a number of reasons. I've had it happen with several other apps including Safari before. Anytime I get an app that just bounces but doesn't open I go right for the plist.

May 22 2005 at 3:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
teksno

wht to do when safari RSS stops working... USE FIREFOX!!! because it doesnt stop working...

May 22 2005 at 3:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris Mcdowell

I havent had my safari stop working yet. I have noticed safari rss feeds scroll more slowly than a regular webpage though. Maybe because they are soooo long. I am on my 2ghz g5

May 22 2005 at 3:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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