Now I am an Apple fan, but that said, I was lured by Firefox 1.5 to break away from my Apple-made browser, Safari 2.0.
A few days ago, I imported all my bookmarks into Firefox and switched my default browser to Firefox. I think it’s interesting that you set the default browser for OS X Tiger inside of Safari’s preferences.
The first thing I noticed was Firefox still trying to route my bookmarked RSS feeds to Safari. This is because when you bookmark them in Safari, it labels them with the feed:// protocol. Which isn’t real, but I have to say that I think it’s a good idea to make an obvious distinction in the type of content it is.
I went to start changing my RSS feeds into Firefox live bookmarks (I think that’s what they’re called). Here I choked on the revised workflow. There’s no visual cue in Firefox to tell me there are new bookmarks and I saw no way to aggregate everything. So I would be left with having to navigate into each live bookmark just to see if there were any new entries. Hmm. No way.
I believe Thunderbird has probably a better RSS implementation than Firefox, but I don’t want a standalone RSS app and I like Apple’s Mail a lot.
So I started looking out there. I like the My Yahoo page better than the Google personalized homepage better right now. I have to like the interface if I’m going to use something, what can I say. So I plugged some RSS feeds into My Yahoo. It worked well. And I thought that I would be able to now subscribe to a My Yahoo feed in Firefox and I’d be set.
Unfortunately, My Yahoo aggregates but does not re-syndicate. I think that aside from legal issues, this might be because there are some potential security/privacy holes if by just GETting a URL you authenticate into your aggregated feed.
I think there are some sites that do what I’m describing, so maybe I’ll give it a try later.
The fact is, I am used to, and love, the visual cues telling me there are new feed entries. But combined with that I love that with a click of the button I can aggregate those categorized feeds. Safari is back as my default browser. Not to say Firefox is out. It is absolutely awesome. But Safari has changed, for me, what I expect in a browser. It’s features are the features my workflow is build around.