I’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.

The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab - much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…

The last two things that Safari rocks at are the integrated spel cheker, a handy key combo to put the text focus in the Google search field in the toolbar. I’ve tried the Firefox spell checker extension, with no luk.

Dave Hyatt Tim Hatcher announced last night that the latest nightly builds of Safari now include a new tool for web developers to view DOM and CSS elements/attributes on a web page. I tried it last night, and it’s excellent - even better than the one built into Firefox. You just right-click anywhere on a page, and a contextual menu item will let you “Inspect Element”. This is perhaps more intuitive than Firefox’s “enter a new mode, then click somewhere on the inspected page” method of visually selecting an element to inspect.

Here’s a screenshot of the fancy new inspector, being used to debug a CSS problem I was having with the text in the header of my blog:

Update: I spaced on the author of the post. I guess I still think of the WebKit blog as Dave’s old Surfin’ Safari blog. It ain’t, and there are multiple authors on the new WebKit blog. Oops.

When I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0 RC3 last week, there was a bug or issue that corrupted a cookie used by the fancy schmancy new authoring screens. Safari barfed all over that corrupt cookie, meaning I couldn’t use it to manage my blog. Firefox just ignored it (and the functionality that required that cookie apparently degraded transparently - the widgets were no longer collapsable or movable).

So, I thought it would be a good chance to switch to Firefox 1.5 for a while and kick the tires a bit as my primary (only) browser.

Things I like about Firefox:

• Fancy schmancy wysiwyg and “ajax” crap all just works.
• Websites don’t try to protect me from myself by warning me that I’m using Safari
• The del.icio.us extension makes creating bookmarks better (but not hugely better than the bookmarklet)
• The great “Web Developer” sidebar, with the cool stuff like cookie inspectors. Many of these tools are reproducable via bookmarklets, but it’s nice to have a unified place to get them all.

Things I don’t like so much:

• NO. SPEL. CHEKER. I tried installing the recommended extension, but it never worked. And wouldn’t have been integrated with the OS-level dictionary I use in every other app on my Powerbook. It’s really uncomfortable typing away, and not being able to know at a glance, or via peripheral vision, if I’d made a typo or a stupid spelling attempt (I rarely get words with more than 3 letters right on the first shot…)
• No Cocoa UI widgets - they’re available in Camino, and are apparently planned for Firefox 3.0 (official plan), but the XUL widgets suck badly, compared to the great ones that are provided by Cocoa. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
• Feels like it is quite a bit slower than Safari. Speed is good.
• Text rendering sucks badly as well. Compare pages to what they look like in Safari. Just simply not as good. And Firefox doesn’t support the CSS dropshadow - meaning my blog’s banner text looks worse in Firefox
• Page load progress indicator - the simple spinning “working…” indicator just ain’t enough. There’s an extension to get more info, including a progress thermometer, but nothing comes close to Safari’s elegant thermometer-beneath-the-location-field implementation.

I tried. I really tried to use Firefox as my default browser. I was kind of enjoying it, but kept finding myself tripping over stuff like a UI that doesn’t respond the way a native MacOSX app should, and a browser that was rather prone to locking up (although pages rendered quickly). Key commands that were quirky and decidedly non-Macish. Mouse buttons didn’t respond as expected (even my multibutton mouse with scrollwheel behaved more reliably under Safari than Firefox).

It felt like Firefox would be just as comfortable running on an X11 server as on my Mac - but that glosses over the nicenesses of the Mac UI. It just got to be too much. I think the only thing I’ll really miss (although that might be stretching it a little) is the WYSIWYG editor support. If I ever really need that, then Firefox is a short command+space Firefox away…

Also, I realized that Safari (with Stand and a few bookmarklets installed) offers about the same functionality in a nice, fast, clean app. I’ll keep Firefox around for testing and debugging stuff, but will be using Safari as my default browser. Or, perhaps, a recent beta of OmniWeb… Damned novelty addiction!

Holy CRAP that’s annoying. I have Safari running on both computers pretty much 100% of the time. My Powerbook’s copy is set to use RSS, and to update feeds automatically. I’d noticed earlier this morning that my subscriptions were holding almost 30,000 items. I thought to myself “Hey, that’s cool! Usually, it corrupts and resets itself to a fresh database at around 20,000 items. I guess that problem’s been fixed somehow.”

Nope. Safari just decided to nuke my items database and start from scratch. All of my subscriptions are safely in my bookmarks file, but the items (and read state) were nuked for all of them. Now, Safari is re-downloading every one of my nearly 500 feeds, and dutifully marking each item as “unread”. What a waste of time THAT is. I might be switching back to NNW yet again. Perhaps I’ll try Vienna or Shrook for a while…

So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).

Also, the filter/sorting options are just plain incomplete. Without a “show only new items” option, it’s a real pain in the ass to view new items. Either you have to set it to show a whole bunch of items, and sort the newest items to the top, to ensure viewing all new items, or you narrow the display and have to iterate over various subgroupings or filterings with the “New” sort option selected. Please, fix this… Add a “New items only” option, that would do what it said (and, items wouldn’t disappear from the display as they are “read” - they would simply be marked as read, and disappear the next time the display is refreshed).

So, after running the handy dandy Safari feeds to OPML export script, I’m back in NetNewsWire. It’s a really great app, but I already miss the Safari unified display (warts and all) - the “Combined View” layout in NNW just isn’t the same. I’ll give it a week or two to see if I can get my head back into NNW-think.

Meanwhile, this is what greeted me in NNW after running the import-from-OPML process, and updating all feeds:

Update: I went screaming back to Safari RSS less than 24 hours after trying to switch to NNW. Performance wasn’t any better when using the Combined view in NNW - it may have actually been worse. I’m back to Safari RSS now, and am just learning to be more patient as things load

Dear Safari RSS team,

Updated 2005/08/01 with thoughts on Flagged vs. Star Ratings

I’ve been using your cool RSS aggregator for a while now, and while it’s really quite good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it really kick ass.

1. Have a “new items only” view - rather than just sorting by New, or sorting by Date, or filtering by “last 7 days” - just show me the new stuff. I’ve got like 15,000 items that appear to get loaded every time I check my feeds. That would drop down to just a hundred or two if I could limit to “New only”. The “Today” filter doesn’t cut it - what if I miss a day? What about Monday mornings? Vacation days? “Last 7 Days” isn’t granular enough. A “New Items” filter should be possible, with the SQL Lite engine storing the feeds and items…
2. Let me collapse/expand entries - sure, the slider dealie to set displayed article length is nice, but what if I could set items to show title only by default, and just twiddle a little knob on the items that I want to read more about to view the full content - without having to affect the displayed article length of every other item on the page
3. Make Safari’s scheduled RSS updates actually, you know, run on a schedule. Often I find that Safari’s forgotten to update for a couple of hours (or it refuses to update after launching, even if it’s the first run of the day). Seems like clicking on my “feeds” folder in the Bookmarks Bar and causing it to start loading the feeds seems to trigger an update. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to babysit an automated update though.
4. It’d be really nice if I could override the default “Remove Articles” setting - so I could set it to automagically purge items after a couple of months, but I could set a feed (or folder of feeds, or whatever) to keep items for a different period (shorter, longer, infinite, whatever). I know it’d be a bit more confusing for the UI, but if I could “Get Info” on a feed, and have access to the settings there, it wouldn’t be in any newbies’ faces…
5. While I’m at it, why can’t I “Get Info” on any bookmark and add additional information? Have it capture the text of the page for searching by Spotlight? Add additional keywords/tags to a bookmark (you know, like the Finder’s “Spotlight Keywords” field) - personal folksonomies in my Bookmarks…
6. How about a “Flagged” bit on a blog entry? With a corresponding “Flagged Items” filter view? Makes it much easier to find stuff that I’ve found interesting before, and kinda makes the persistent store of feeds and items, you know, useful…

OK. That’s it for now. Keep up the great work. If there’s anything I can do to help out, just give me a shout.

Update: Just had a “duh” moment - instead of just having a “flagged” bit (which is by definition a binary toggle), what about following iTunes and iPhoto by having star ratings for feeds and items? Then I could filter on previous items that were ranked 3 stars or higher… Actually, following the iTunes/iPhoto model for “get info” would work as well - being able to set multiple DublinCore-ish fields to help find stuff later…

Thanks to a pointer from Sameer D’Costa, I just used a handy shell script to export all of my Safari RSS subscriptions to an OPML file that can be imported into Wordpress to update my links/blogroll. Easy peasy.

I hadn’t realized how much my subscription list had grown… It’s now up to 469 feeds, and I didn’t even realize it - that’s 100 new feeds since switching to Safari RSS.

Update: Almost forgot - had to modify the .opml export slightly. Out of the box, the script exports urls as “xmlUrl”, but Wordpress expects “htmlUrl” - easy to change using a batch find/replace, and easy to fix the script, too.

Since I’ve moved to Safari as my RSS reader, I’ve lost the easy way of updating the blogroll/links section of my blog. I used to just export my subscriptions from NetNewsWire as OPML, which was then easily ingested by WordPress.

I’m realizing that my blogroll/links are now woefully out of date, and would like to bring them into sync with my current subscriptions - but am not about to start manually syncing them.

Is there any way to readily export OPML of bookmarks (ideally, of a selected bookmark folder, or just “All RSS Feeds”) from Safari? This feels like a good candidate for Automator, but it looks like the Automator action vocabulary for Safari is missing the needed bits.

I fully expected to have to drop Safari as my primary RSS reader, and revert to NetNewsWire 2.0. I assumed that the lack of all of the wonderful features would cripple me in my quest to satisfy my RSS addiction. I thought I’d be frustrated and annoyed with Safari’s RSS implementation.

I’m not. I found that the only time I launch NetNewsWire now is for a daily update of podcast downloads (Safari RSS doesn’t do enclosures). But, I read all of my feeds and posts in Safari. For a bit of background - in NNW, I stick to the “New Posts” folder more than 99% of the time, and just cycle through posts as they come in - so the One True Page listing in Safari is just fine for my style.

The biggest thing I assumed I’d miss is the “Flagged” toggle on posts in NNW. However, posts that I flag almost always get tossed onto my del.icio.us account anyway, so that’s really not a big loss. And now I’m forced to “flag” things in such a way that I can access them from anywhere, rather than having the flag buried in my NNW database on my Powerbook.

I have Safari set to check all of my 390-ish feeds, but have separated my Flickr feeds out of the “main” folder of feeds so that I can check it separately (say, once a day, rather than with every update). I also have Safari set to prioritize New Posts, show recent articles from the last 7 days (so I don’t miss a couple of posts say from late last night - a “New Posts” item under Recent Articles would be perfect). I also have “Article Length” set to be just the titles and the first couple of lines of a post - so I can scan pretty quickly through all new posts.

There are a few tweaks I’d like to see in Safari’s RSS implementation:

• the “New Posts” item in “Recent Articles”
• enclosures support
• a way to mark all feeds as “Read” so I don’t have to load 1000 items if I haven’t viewed in a day or so
• showing some status on feed updating
• The search field not grabbing the cursor automatically, so I have to click in the main window before I can hit SPACE to start paging down. Frigging annoying!

Other than that, it’s surprisingly solid.

Here’s a screenshot of my Safari RSS setup (click the image for a full view)

Compare with a current view of NNW as I use it (click image for a full view)

I’ve been using Safari as my RSS reader today, to see how it works, and am actually pretty surprised at how well it handles all of my feeds (after going through a roundabout process to get all 390 feeds imported from NetNewsWire Pro 2.0)

The combined display has grown on me - at first I absolutely hated it, with my body physically rejecting it in preference to manually cycling through posts by title in a list, and seeing the selected post individually displayed in a pane. Once I let go of that, it’s a much more magazine-like experience, and it’s not bad at all.

I’ve found a few weak points, however:

• No way to show only the new items. You can sort so that new items are at the top, and select “Today” as a filter, but even that is a bit lacking. My current Safari RSS feed display page says “25 new, 1173 total” - that’s with only today’s posts, and sorted so that new items are on top. It loads all 1173 items at once, which is a bit much, since it also grabs images etc. for each post. As a result, performance can kind of suck when viewing a lot of posts. This would be solved by having a “New items” option in the “Recent Articles:” sidebar filter widget.
• Enclosures. No support at all. It would be cool if it could automagically detect enclosures, and pass audio files off to iTunes, and store other files appropriately. Sure, it’s not a newbie feature, but it sure is taking off and it would be a shame to leave everyone out of the podcasting craze…
• No real way to import feeds from other tools. A nice OPML bookmark importer would be nice (and provide the option to automagically transmorgify the urls from http:// to feed:// protocols)
• No .Mac web access to the feeds. It’s got all of the data sitting there in my iSynced Bookmarks - why not give me access via the web for when I’m away from my own machine?
• Having to click on the bookmark folder (I call mine, creatively enough, “feeds”) in the Bookmarks Bar, then scrolling down to the bottom to select “View All RSS Articles”. That’s clunky when I’ve got a lot of feeds in the root folder. It would be nice if I could set the folder in the Bookmarks Bar to “Auto-RSS-View” (like a regular folder’s “Auto-tab” option), and it just jumps to the “View All RSS Feeds” page with one click.

Things I really like:

• It’s free and bundled with the OS. Everyone’s going to start playing with RSS. No excuses about it being too hard or not having access to the software or anything.
• Being able to use iSync and .Mac to synchronize my feeds on any machine I use
• The magazine-like display really grew on me. I love that the “Article Length” dealie lets me switch from full posts to abstracts to just titles without hitting a menu or a preference or anything
• Using “View All RSS Articles” nicely recurses through deeply nested folder hierarchies, grabbing all posts from all feeds. Nice.
• Being able to email links to RSS view pages. That rocks. I could set up a folder of feeds, and link it on a web page or email it, and anyone clicking the link (and using Safari on Tiger) will get the aggregator page. Easy way to share blogrolls (or just subsets of them).

I’m a pretty die-hard NetNewsWire Pro user now, but am dabbling with Safari’s built-in RSS aggregator on one machine. It lacks some of the things that i really like about NNW (marking posts as read and/or flagged). The all-posts-in-one-long-page thing is growing on me. I never got into the “Combo View” in NNW, but for some reason this is working for me (perhaps it’s the “article length” slider doowackie that lets me easily switch from titles-only to whole-enchilada mode).

To really test it out, though, I’ll want to import all of my NNW subscriptions over to see if it falls on its face. Any ideas on how to move all 390 feeds from NNW –> Safari? The OPML file wasn’t recognized by Safari’s “Import Bookmarks” function. Perhaps a job for Automator? (couldn’t find the Safari “add bookmark” automator action, though…)

Update: Well, there is this hack/technique to get feeds from NNW –> Firefox + Sage –> Safari. The import ran nice and easily, but having Safari display all of my feeds is taking for freaking ever - wonder if that’s just a first-time-you-view-a-bunch-of-feeds thing, or an it-just-doesn’t-scale-to-390-feeds thing…

Update: Looks like a (hard?) limit of 40 feeds per folder. That kinda sucks… Oh, well. I won’t be using Safari RSS for much, then. I also much prefer the one-post-at-a-time style of interface in NNW, rather than the here’s-everything style of Safari RSS (and NNW’s Combo view). It’s much easier to absorb the content one post at a time…

Update: I just filed a bug on Safari for the 40-feed maximum. Hopefully that’s addressed in an update. If they want people to start really using RSS (and the one-click implementation is so nice that people will start really using it), then they need to be able to handle lots of feeds.

Update: I looked into it a bit further, and it looks like it was only automagically “blessing” the first 40 feeds in a folder by switching the protocol to “feed://” from “http://” - I just opened Safari’s Bookmarks.plist file in SubEthaEdit, and did a batch search-and-replace on the feeds portion of my bookmarks, relaunched Safari, and now it looks like it’s seeing all feeds… So, it’s not a 40-items-in-the-UI limit, it’s something apparently funky with how it checks feeds… At least there’s a workaround.

I’ve been using delicious2Safari for a while now, and it’s a really nice (and free) way to integrate your carefully tagged folksonomies from del.icio.us into your Safari bookmarks.

Combine that with Safari Stand, which makes an extremely useful bookmarks search utility only an F4 away, and I’ve got a very handy offline cache of del.icio.us bookmarks.

I’ve also got a shortcut in the Sogudi extension to Safari, so all I have to do when I’m online is enter “del whatevertagiwant” in the location bar of Safari, and BOOM - my del.icio.us bookmarks with that tag.

Very handy loose integration of small pieces.

John Hicks just posted a link to Stand - an InputManager that extends Safari in new and wonderful ways.

The coolest thing it does is give you a new way to quickly access bookmarks - hit F4 and a search widget pops up. Hit some keys, and your bookmarks are filtered on the fly. Very cool. You can even configure it to close the floating widget after opening a bookmark.

It somehow modifies the View Source window, so that source code for a page is properly syntax highlighted (and you can set any font you like as well).

It also does some other useful things, like optionally forcing all links targeted at “_blank” to open in a new tab rather than new windows. It also provides better searching/filtering of browser history (that’s how I quickly found the URL for John’s post - I last saw it this morning and just hit the history search to pull it up quickly).

Stand probably does a bajillion other things. The website looks like it is in Japanese, so I can’t read the official description or changelog, but it works GREAT!

When Dave Hyatt announced some of the cool new additions to WebCore to support Dashboard etc. - via “extensions” made to HTML - my first reaction was “Hey, that’s cool!”, followed rather quickly with “but, doesn’t that break the standards?”

Things like the cool new <input type="search" /> attribute (announced here) on the input element work great, look awesome, but as a result, make the source page invalid XHTML-Transitional. Doh.

The new <canvas /> element (announced here), which gives you a place to draw bitmaps via javascript (and is used by the analog clock widget in Tiger’s Dashboard), also very cool and useful, but not in the standard…

I’m glad to see I’m not alone in this feeling. Tim Bray just posted on this as well. If it bugs one of the godfathers of XML, it’s got to be a real issue. I’ve implemented the new <input type="search" /> attribute in the search form on this weblog to try it out (you can only see it if you’re using Tiger or Safari 1.3 Dev. Preview - otherwise it looks like a Plain Old text input box), so I’m not religious about it, but this sorta feels like the Netscape/IE “enhancements” of the ’90s…<shudder />

UPDATE: It looks like the Blosxom Autotrack plugin has run amok, hammering Dave’s weblog over 300 times (180-ish on each of 2 posts on his weblog). Holy crap. I’m SO SORRY, Dave! I’ve deleted the Autotrack plugin. It won’t happen again! I’m emailing Dave directly with apologies. Crap, this is so embarrasing…