Filed under: Software, Bugs/Recalls, Internet
Giving up on Safari RSS
Okay. I've had it. I gave it a nice month long go. I like the way it looks and works when it works. However, I'm having way too many problems with Safari RSS. Granted, I am a power-RSS user with over 250 feeds which I churn through daily, so it may work fine and trouble free for people with fewer feeds. Nevertheless, about once a week, it behaves oddly and I either have to trash my prefs or go through some other bits of troubleshooting that are just too much work for me. Time to get back into the NetNewsWire swing of things. At least until Apple fixes the Safari RSS bugginess.
Anybody else giving up on Safari RSS?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Brian said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I gave up on it as well. I just like the interface of NNW too much...and Safari RSS didn't really fit my style of RSSing (Is that a verb?)
I do LOVE it for getting new feeds though. I hated having to search thru sites for RSS/XML buttons. I just have it set to add the feed to NNW when I click the blue button.
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daniel e said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I gave up Safari RSS to go back to NetNewsWire Lite because it is so much faster. Safari RSS would get caught up when i tried to open multiple feeds and required longer loading times. Back to NetNewsWire
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Tim O. said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
nope, still using it.
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Stephen Rice said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Could somebody be kind enough to list out the benfits of RSS readers for me? I have given it a good go for the past month, and have had trouble realizing any benefits, especially for sites such as TUAW. All the RSS reader appears to accomplish is giving a stripped down version of the page, while I would generally prefer the full version.
Is there something that I am doing wrong? Features I am not taking advantage of? My set-up is as follows:
I have made a special folder in my bookmarks menu for all RSS sites, and select "Open in tabs" two to three times a day. I then go through all of the tabs and catch up on the news. This, however, would be the exact same were I to simply bookmark the regular sites and open them all in tabs, except that, in the latter method, I would skip the step of clicking on "read more," which gets annoying.
What am I missing?
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Gerald Buckley said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Untypically poor execution on Apple's part. Gave up on Safari w/ RSS during the prerelase developer previews. Icky implementation overall. Still waiting on something spectacular. Until then Firefox is getting me by that is INTEGRATED with a browser.
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Mark said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I'm using Kinja (http://www.kinja.com), which makes my RSS consumption portable, rather than binding it to my desktop.
The benefits - Hitting refresh on my Kinja page instantly shows me if there's updated content on any number of sites...and the intro lets me know if it's something I'm interested in clicking through to read.
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Small Paul said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Previously, I used Firefox's RSS bookmarks. I prefer Safari RSS, as it shows me how many new items there are right there in my bookmarks bar. (I also prefer Safari over Firefox for browsing, so that fits much nicer.)
However, I'm not convinced Safari does the right thing all the time when judging whether an item is new or not. Maybe some of my sites are just creating their RSS files wrongly, but I quite often get repeat articles, which is a little bit annoying.
I've never gotten around to using an actual standalone RSS reader, so maybe if I get the time to try NetNewsWire Lite properly, I'll move to that.
Stephen: the idea is that RSS readers check sites for you, and tell you when there's something new. Without that you have to actually, y'know... *look* at the sites *yourself*. Ugh! Menial tasks such as these are the domain of the machines.
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_victor said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Repeat after me: "Rough around the edges."
It's the new mantra for Tiger.
I have only just begun to use Safari RSS (not on my primary work machine though).
Good to know it will soon become a burden...
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Steve said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
How do you set Safari RSS to add the RSS feed to NNW Lite when you click the blue button? Thanks.
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Thomas said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
Sage RSS reader in Firefox all the way. Safari's is nice, however still lacking. Maybe Apple will upgrade it in the future.
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Ken said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
http://www.Bloglines.com
I don't understand why anyone would use anything else.
Why use another application when you can just use any browser. Any where.
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Izzy said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I'm using Safari RSS in a different way since all of my feeds are handled through Bloglines.
When I come to a news site or I'm doing research and looking for a specific article I'll just hit the RSS button and then search through the headlines. Also works well for sites that I enjoy the content of, but can't stand the layout or color scheme (all sites with black backgrounds and white text, I'm looking at you).
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Iso Grifo said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I'm not giving up on Safari's RSS. I never used an RSS reader before, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask about it. But if it hadn't been for Tiger and the RSS reader built in, I wouldn't have seen this article. Now I check TUAW every 30 minutes... when Safari updates my feed!
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Twist said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I tried it out when I first installed Tiger but I like NewsFire better. I do love how Safari RSS has the pref for default feed reader though. Means I can now just click the RSS link to add the feed to NewsFire.
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TC said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
John: AcidSearch adds the inline search functionality to Safari.
I've given up on Safari RSS, too. I'm trying NetNewsWire, but it seems to be very slow - marking 150 articles as read generally means a beachball for a few seconds, and a sluggish response when switching to the next feed. Hopefully that'll be fixed soon (or I'll somehow be able to afford a 2.7GHz PowerMac :)
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EC said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I have another problem with my Safari RSS, brand new, freshly installed: it doesn't open any www.apple.com URL or pages...
Does anyone know how to fix?
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Daniel said 10:56AM on 6-22-2005
i gave up the second i saw it was going to be a big fat hassle.
and the completely gave up when it didn't work as well as NetNewsWire
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Scott Ahten said 3:49PM on 6-25-2005
While Safari is my primary browser, I never really cared for Safari RSS. I subscribe to nearly 40 feeds, which really doesn't work with the current UI.
"Why use another application when you can just use any browser. Any where."
Except when you're offline. NetNewsWire caches content (except images) and lets me read entries everywhere. Even when I'm offline.
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NCTRNL said 9:11AM on 6-28-2005
I am a Firefox user. I like the way it handles RSS better. I like the way it handles them as bookmarks and you can scroll through them.
I also hate the way that the RSS Screen Saver works...
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Mikey said 10:21AM on 6-28-2005
I tried it. I don't hate it but I like that NetNewsWire is specificly for RSS. I do like the fact in Safari RSS that if the site I'm looking at has a feed it will send it to NNW.
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