Feeds and FireFox

Right, so I've been doing the FireFox thing for 2 weeks now and the RSS reader thing for about a week. Here's the good and the bad - the test report card.

FireFox rules. Really it does. I love the tabbed browsing (constantly got Gmail and GReader open, yet still room to browse), the "restore session" when you have to restart your browser, the little add-on things, and how quickly it loads pages. What I don't like is that the site I designed looked terrible! :-) Well, not that bad - but some of the layout was dodgy in FFox, where it was OK in IE. Now fixed.

My biggest gripe about FFox though is the Bookmarks. In IE you can "personalize" them, so that the ones you visit most regularly show up in a shortened menu and the others are hidden. But not so in FFox - everything shows, and in my case that means trawling through scrolldowns until I find what I want. Hoping FFox will have an add-on to change that sometime, or an update of some sort.

RSS - well, what can I say. Google Reader works very well and is easy to manage - though it does take a bit of time to update new items. As of this morning I've got a Reader Notifer for FFox installed, similar to Gmail's notifier, so new stuff pops up to tell me it's arrived. I realize that readers have completely messed up many of our blog stats 'cos people don't drop by anymore, but read remotely. Ah well, these things happen! :-)

The bad? Well I've become what one friend termed a "feed whore" - I keep adding stuff to my list, in the hope that every time it updates I'll have new stuff to read. Already got over 100 things first thing in the mornig, but is that enough? Nooooo ... :-) Bit of an addiction.

But I also don't like the loss of the "surprise" factor - of clicking through to a website and seeing "hey! there's something new! cool!!". I don't like missing out on the whole effect a site design conveys - the text/images in a reader just don't give you that feel for the site. I enjoy seeing site tweaks - new icons, new layout, a colour change, or updates that don't flow through on a reader screen. So I still do click through to some sites, just because that's the fun part of surfing the net.

Will I go back to IE and no RSS? Hell no. Minor irritations notwithstanding, it's been a good move.

Next up? Well I've been told I need to get with the times and figure out del.icio.us.. :-)