ricketyclick

OK, I’m about sick to death of Firefox. I mean it’s driving me to shrieking rage several times a day.

About every thirty minutes or so, it decides that it needs to do something so important, it should use up 100% of my available CPU cycles, taking my computer away from me for about 50 seconds.

Once or twice a day, it never gives it back, and I have to kill the Firefox process. I then have to start Firefox in safe-mode, let it run for a minute or so, then restart FF normally.

Yes, goddamnit, I have spent hours tracking down fixes for this CPU spike, and have tried over a dozen different ones. I’m sick of fooling with it. “Goddamnit”, because every once in a while I mention this on Slashdot or other popular forum, and I always get some FF partisan telling me what a lazy noob I am for not going to the FF site or forums and looking at the available fixes. (And once, someone told me I’m the only person having this problem, there must be something wrong with me.) So, yes, I have, actually, tried to look this up and fix it and I’m just sick of it.

So today I started trying new browsers.

First up, Chrome. No good, because there’s not a Linux version. Piss on you, Google.

Second up, Safari: Apple or Windows only. No, I don’t want to screw around with Wine. Piss on you, Apple.

Third up, Epiphany. I actually get to install this one.

The Good:

• Fast.
• Clean.

The Bad:

• No bookmark sidebar: showstopper.
• No search bar: showstopper.
• Fails to properly import my Firefox bookmarks: showstopper.
• Fails to find the RSS/Atom feeds on half a dozen websites: showstopper.

The Ugly:

• This is not a damn Eastwood movie. Five minutes finds four killers. Why the hell should I bother looking for and writing about stuff that simply makes me roll my eyes?
• Oh, OK, then, one Ugly: can’t add a tab by right-clicking in the Tab bar. Yes, I added the “New Tab” icon to the Toolbar. That’s why this is an ugly, not a showstopping Bad.

So, Epiphany is a no-go. Partisans? Piss off with your diddly fixes and workarounds. When I first loaded FF, everything I wanted was right there, out in the open. Let me know when you’re serious about making Epiphany a serious tool.

Next up, Opera.

I’ve been playing with feeds and feed aggregators.

They don’t work, dammit. (Well, OK, they don’t work the way I want them to.) This is something that ought to be dirt simple, and that nobody’s been able to get right over the several years I’ve been trying to use feeds.

(For those of you who don’t know about feeds, see here.)

Among others, I tried Feed Sidebar.

Nice try, but no.

This is a slightly-edited version of the review/comment I left there, although it hasn’t yet shown up.

2/5 stars.

Less than a day after installing it, amid much hair-pulling, I ripped it back out again.

Look, guys, all I want is something that flags my bookmarks if they’ve changed since the last time I visited them. I click on the link, and the flag goes away. Make this an option, and I’ll reconsider.

I don’t want a special folder I’m not allowed to organize. I don’t need to have all those feeds re-rendered as my own bland, featureless personal newspaper. I certainly don’t want each article link to open separately. I don’t want to click on the feed link, then move down to another pane and click on the site link, then click on the “mark read” button…. Just open the site, please, and mark it read.

No, clicking on the “mark all read” button doesn’t work either–it takes several minutes to work through the whole list.

And I especially don’t need my computer hijacked periodically while you go through 200 or 300 links, most of which only update once a day at most, but some of which update hourly or better, and some of which are neglected for days, then are updated several times in a few hours (like, for instance, that idiot Ricketyclick blog). (Those last are the ones I most need a feed flagger for.) This means that I want to be able to schedule each link separately, or at least put the links in several scheduling bins (the hourly bin, the twice-daily bin, the daily bin, the weekly bin…).

I’m sorry to whine about this, but I want such a simple thing, and in all the years since RSS first appeared, I’ve never found an app that could do it right.

Piss off. Again.

I’m playing with a feed aggregator. Don’t mind me.

This post will disappear at my whim.

===

Update:

Wordpress is only offering an RSS feed, not the more standardized and sophisticated Atom feed. There’s a plugin that’s supposed to upgrade to Atom, but the resulting feed failed to validate, so I pulled it. I’ll see about editing the feed templates by hand.