Safari 1.3 and feed URIs
The feed URI scheme (aka: ‘feed:// protocol’) should make it easy to subscribe to RSS news feeds with one-click. Nick Bradbury (author of FeedDemon) explains:
[…] let’s face it: subscribing to feeds is a huge pain right now and it’s causing far too much confusion. Feed reading has left the phase where only techies do it, so relying on orange XML and RSS buttons that spew XML when clicked just doesn’t cut it.
The feed protocol aims to simplify this mess so that clicking on a
feed://link enables quick subscription via the user’s feed reader. I’m hoping more applications - and more web sites - support this protocol so that we can put the days of subscribing by URL copy/pasting behind us.
This has become a fairly well supported mechanism (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator, Shrook, RSS Bandit, NewzCrawler, Sharpreader amongst others support the feed URI scheme). Now, this depends on the browser telling your RSS reader “Hey, here�s a feed for you… now do something with it!”.
Safari v1.2 ‘played nice’ and passed the URI of the feed to your RSS reader, the feed was subscribed-to, and it was all tickety-boo. It seems that Safari v1.3 (released on Friday with the 10.3.9 System upgrade) stops doing this, and nags you to upgrade to Tiger (which hasn’t been released yet).
The worst thing is that this doesn’t seem like just a regression. Dealing with feed:// links is a special case, someone sat there and composed this ‘Error’ message — knowing that the old behaviour had changed, and presumably had it translated into the 14 languages in which Safari ships. This pretty much sucks.
Published at 9:55 am on April 17th, 2005.
Topics: Mac Software
22 Comments
Yeah. I noticed that too. It’s a real shame.
I hope that I’ll still be able to point feed:// URLs to NetNewsWire in 10.4.
Also notice how it says “feed:http://…”. Kinda strange.
Comment by Denis Defreyne at 8:21 pm on April 17th, 2005 #link
I’d hope so to!
(”feed:http://…” was actually intended, I think it’s allowed in the draft of the spec. That way you can have “feed:https://…” too without registering another protocol handler.)
Comment by Tim at 9:56 pm on April 17th, 2005 #link
I can’t help but wonder whether or not Apple is going to reserve the feed scheme for their own browser (in 10.4).
Comment by Serdar Kilic at 12:02 am on April 18th, 2005 #link
This is the kind of stunt that gets companies sued all the time. Just goes to show that Apple is equally creepy with Microsoft when it comes to these kinds of stunts. Do they really think this gets them more happy customers? You just wonder whose head was up where when they cooked this up. Unbelievavle!
Comment by Ward Mundy at 1:10 am on April 18th, 2005 #link
Well is it any surprise? Safari in Tiger uses it’s own RSS reader so they don’t want you to use external ones. I can’t see why they’ve put it in 10.3.9 update though as it’s nothing to do with Tiger.
Chris
Comment by Chris Good at 6:00 am on April 18th, 2005 #link
That’s because the new safari’s webcore is the same as the one about to come out in 10.4. This was an oversight, a mistake, and it will be fixed.
Comment by Johnny G at 12:13 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
I read somewhere that Safari RSS would support third-party feed reader software, such as NewsFire and NetNewsWire, although can’t seem to find the original article - can anyone confirm that this is or isn’t the case?
Comment by Peter Parkes at 12:13 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
Since Safari 2 has an RSS section in its prefs that allow you to set the default RSS reader, I’d be willing to bet there is a default that you can change to set what the default RSS reader is in 1.3 as well. I’m guessing that its just set to safari by default.
Comment by J D at 2:50 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
RE: #8 (JD) - hmmm… I’ve already got NetNewsWire set as the default helper for RSS feeds. I’d place my bet on Apple taking their eye off the ball while focusing on Tiger.
Comment by Tim at 3:03 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
geez, i can’t see what all the fuss is about. so you have to copy a URL to another application until some sort of standard develops. i think there are more important things to worry about.
Comment by superfunkomatic at 7:34 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
RE: #10 (superfunkomatic) - The older version of Safari was supporting the emerging standard. Sure, for the technically adept, this isn’t a big deal. The process to subscribe to a feed in Safari 1.3 is inelegant (at best) and confusing, while it used to be simple and straightforward. That’s what the fuss is about!
Comment by Tim at 9:18 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
hmmm.. well then I’m not sure. However, if it makes you feel any better, a little bird told me that it works fine in Tiger. The little bird has been known to be spot on in the past.
Comment by J D at 10:10 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
RE: #12 (JD) - A little access-log monitoring bird told me a few of the commenters on this page are using
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412. The little bird also reckoned that must be the user-agent for Safari 2, so I don’t doubt your little bird is spot on!Comment by Tim at 11:10 pm on April 18th, 2005 #link
Dave Hyatt (on his weblog):
Comment by Tim at 9:29 am on April 19th, 2005 #link
There are a couple of hacks to fix this. macoshints: Take back the ‘feed:’ URL from Safari 1.3, and apparently SafariStand has a of method for fixing it too.
Comment by Tim at 9:46 am on April 21st, 2005 #link
This is probably the best fix as it does a lot more than just allowing the target of RSS links to be selected:
http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/
Under the Internet tab, the RSS default applications with 10.3.9 are “Shrook” and “Safari 1.3″, in my case. The second wasn’t there before …
Comment by thebrix at 10:29 am on April 21st, 2005 #link
RE: #16 (thebrix) - Although… that doesn’t actually fix it. I’ve got my default RSS feed reader set to NetNewsWire, and Safari 1.3 doesn’t respect that setting.
Comment by Tim at 11:24 am on April 21st, 2005 #link
Slightly off topic, but I’ve noticed some box model bugs in Safari 1.3 (embarassingly enough, Friendster): is ANYTHING better about Safari 1.3? I kind of wish I hadn’t upgraded. I’ve been mostly using OmniWeb until Tiger is released…
Comment by Nick Valvo at 2:40 am on April 22nd, 2005 #link
Safari 1.3 users:
At the bottom of this page on the right is a RSS button. Hover your mouse over and it turns into a question mark? I think maybe this was intended blocking RSS feeds on Safari to get you out of using your other news reader and to get you ready to use Tiger’s RSS reader?
Comment by tom at 3:58 pm on April 29th, 2005 #link
In Safari in 10.4, you will be able to set your favourite news reader. Don’t worry.
Also see Brent Simmon’s post about NetNewsWire and Safari in Tiger.
Comment by Denis Defreyne at 10:13 am on April 30th, 2005 #link
I apologize in advance I’m a MAC newbie, but I thought I heard/read that Safari already “Suppported” RSS. I have 10.3.9 and 1.3, but I guess not, I guess have to wait for Tiger upgrade???
Comment by David Walker at 7:37 am on May 6th, 2005 #link
You can still use a different news reader, such as NetNewsWire, instead of Safari. Besides, NetNewsWire works well in 10.2 and up, not just in Tiger.
Comment by Denis Defreyne at 12:02 pm on May 17th, 2005 #link