Quickie: Safari Land
I’m clearly falling down on the blog social contract to post regularly, which I will rectify soon…. In the mean time, I couldn’t help but post this image, which demonstrates two different things on my mind recently. First, it shows that even in 2006 we are still dealing with browser compatibility issues. Second, I have been having a love/hate relationship with Safari for quite some time. I really like the built-in RSS support, for instance — in fact, it’s probably the only feature that really keeps me using Safari as my primary browser. I’ve tried using some of the Firefox RSS plugins, but they just don’t work as nicely (though, Safari seems to once in a while decide to “forget” which RSS articles have been read and makes everything as “new” again — which sucks). On the other hand, since I tend to have many windows open, each of which has many tabs, Safari has a tendency to get really bogged down and start to move…very…very…slowly. For some reason it often happens when typing into a TEXTAREA form field (or any form field, really). Often, if I close whatever tab has some Flash running it solves the problem, so I’m not sure I can really blame Safari per se. Between Safari, Shiira, Camino, Firefox, and Flock I have 2 WebKit-based browsers and 3 Gecko-based browsers, and I’m oh so close to moving to Flock full time (or possibly Camino) — anyone know of a really good RSS plugin that lets you put feeds in folders on the bookmark bar?
What you may not have taken into account, however, is that Writely is a wee bit buggy itself. I suggest dropping them a line. Also, have you tried Sage for Firefox? I use NewsHutch these days for my RSS feeds, but before that the Sage plugin was great.
Comment by Steve S — August 21, 2006 @ 1:18 am
In Firefox just single left click on the orange RSS icon in the URL bar (if an RSS feed exists for that site) and you’ll get a “Live Bookmark”.
(oops you’re on a Mac … maybe that’s different)
Comment by Scott Fitchet — August 21, 2006 @ 6:30 am
Steve S — I have played with Sage, and it’s not bad, but it doesn’t quite capture what I like about Safari RSS. The “Live Bookmark” functionality is pretty weak, IMO — doesn’t make it easy to scan through lots of feeds and know what’s new, etc. The RSS support built into Flock is pretty nice — I’m playing with it. Maybe it’s time for me to go back to a dedicated RSS client, which would free me from the main Safari feature that keeps me there.
Comment by Nathan Dintenfass — August 21, 2006 @ 9:45 am