First, the splash screen:

Boy, she loves her phone. Could you imagine being this person, knowing that thousands of people worldwide are looking at that picture? With that hair?

But that’s not the good one. This is the good one, from the configuration wizard:

Seriously. What’s with him? Stop looking at me like that! Also, nice belt.
(Also good: “What is a Cable?”)

Last night I went to move the LiveJournal friends I read regularly into Bloglines, since I’d found that I had been missing a lot of their posts because I don’t read far enough back on my friends page sometimes. Bloglines supports HTTP auth, but only after importing a couple hundred feeds did I learn that it doesn’t support digest auth fails to authenticate against LiveJournal. Without auth, I can’t see friends-only posts, so that’s no good. A deal-breaker, in fact.

So I set about finding a new feed reader, and am trying four: NewsGator, a Web-based reader like Bloglines; FeedDemon, a standalone Windows application from the NewsGator people; and Sage and Brief, two Firefox extensions. Below the cut you can find my thoughts on those four plus Bloglines.

My requirements for RSS readers are pretty specific. They must work in newspaper format (when reading a feed, all of the articles shown together in one pane), not in email format (a list of subjects, and you can read one at a time). They must support OPML import and export. They must let me store feeds in folders. They must support some sort of authorization that lets me read LiveJournal friends. They must handle hundreds of feeds and thousands of unread items without grinding to a halt.

On top of that I’ve got a bunch of things I prefer but don’t require: reading a feed should mark it as read without having to click on individual articles or a “mark all read” button. Clicking an article should open it up in its own browser tab. Feeds that don’t have any new articles should still appear in the feed list.

Bloglines

Pluses: Very fast. Since it’s online, checks feeds for you even when you’re not there. Designed for newspaper-style reading. Handles opening originals in new tabs intuitively. Good subscription-editing tools. Nice simple easy-to-read layout. Frames and AJAX make it work like an application instead of a series of webpages.

Minuses: Doesn’t support any kind of authorization other than Basic Won’t authenticate with LiveJournal, which is a deal-breaker for me.

Summary: If it weren’t for the authorization problem I’d still be using it, and this whole effort is to find something like Bloglines but better. It’s like throwing out a favorite pair of jeans.

NewsGator

Pluses: Works very much like Bloglines: online, newspaper-style, sensible handling of opening new articles. Authentication support is explicit, with username and password fields for feeds instead of just having to supply a http://user:pass@hostname URL.

Minuses: Slower than molasses. Not frame- or AJAX-based, so every click on a feed forces the entire page to reload, and scrolling down to read a busy feed makes the list of feeds scroll off the top of the screen. Doesn’t mark a feed as read when you display all unread articles in it. (What else could “read” mean?) Feeds with no unread articles don’t appear in the feed list.

Summary: The performance problems are a deal-breaker. The navigation issues can be worked around in part by GreaseMonkey. Maybe if it loaded faster the complete page loads would be a non-issue, but it doesn’t.

Sage

Pluses: Browser-based, so it’s always right there. Can use Firefox’s own cookies for authentication. Updates feeds pretty fast for a local reader (and even faster if you pair it with Live Bookmarks, I’m told). Feed editing done via Manage Bookmarms panel. Minimal featureset, very much in the “do one thing well” vein. Allows restyling of article view with user-supplied CSS. Marks a feed as read as soon as you bring it up, in newspaper style. (Also supports email style if that’s your kink.)

Minuses: Sits in the sidebar, so while it’s open, it’s open in every browser tab. Since it’s browser-based, it has to update when you open it instead of showing up ready to read. Doesn’t show number of posts unread in feed list.

Summary: Pretty darn close to Just Right, but having it stick around in all tabs is a real pain. Browser integration makes a lot of things easy, particularly feed management and authentication. There’s apparently a patch that makes it display number of unread posts, but I haven’t found it yet.

Brief

Pluses: Browser-based, so shares most of the benefits of Sage — but this one is its own XUL page, so it doesn’t have the sidebar-everywhere issue that Sage does. Shows number unread. Accepts user CSS styles for newspaper view, but not the same styles as Sage (sigh). Provides total number unread in the status bar.

Minuses: Very, very slow; about a minute just to display 300 feeds with 3000 or so unread items. Folders don’t collapse. No “mark all as read”. Since it’s the other Firefox feed reader, there’s a better chance it will fade into obscurity at some point in the future.

Summary: The performance issues and having to click a button on every single post to mark it read make this a non-starter, which is a shame because the single-XUL-page interface worked out very well.

FeedDemon

Pluses: Standalone application can sit there updating while I use my browser for other things; even then, it handles 300 feeds with 3000+ unread with ease. Newspaper view is intuitive. Shows number of unread posts. Accepts user styles (but not CSS). Supports digest authentication, with a separate config panel for passwords.

Minuses: Many, many features I’ll never use, like podcasting, synchronization with Outlook, and a built-in browser. Synchronization with Newsgator doesn’t seem to maintain folder structure. Doesn’t mark a feed read when viewing it. Commercial software with trial period. Feeds and folders will only sort alphabetically. Built-in tabbed browser is IE.

Summary: I can see why a lot of people consider FeedDemon essential, and it’s close to what I’m after, but a standalone application takes second place to something that sits in the browser. That might just take getting used to, though.

* * *

So as it stands I think it’s going to be a battle between Sage and FeedDemon, although I’m also considering writing a Digest Auth proxy and pointing Bloglines at that to get it to read friends-locked posts I’d be able to see on LiveJournal itself. I’m sure I’ve missed an option or two I should check out, though — if any readers have a favorite Windows RSS reader which works newspaper-style, handles digest auth, and meets the rest of my requirements, or if anyone has any input on the ones I’ve listed above, let me know!

You can tell they’re terrorists because they mix battery brands. Ok, so there’s a gun in a bag, but other than that I’d think they busted a HAM meet. Solders of fortune, etc.

<Substitute> Peace be upon you, Ali. In the drawer in the kitchen are many batteries. Other members of the cell cannot tell which are charged and which are not. Could you make sure to throw out any dead batteries before the day of jihad? Thanks again, Abu.

So maybe they were in a rush to get the story up and wanted a picture and that’s all the police or local reporters had come up with. That’s fine, the story eventually stops being “developing” and they can put a new picture up, and they did:

Ah, yeah, that’s a lot more terrifying. Family-band radios, flashlights, and a barbecue grill! Who’d they arrest, Macgyver?

<Substitute> In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. Ali, Abu and I have both talked to you before about the kitchen drawer. The disorganization in there impedes the struggle and makes it difficult for other members of the cell to construct bombs and even to repair the Aerostar’s fuel pump last week. We have taken everything and put it in a blue Ikea bag. Please sort it out before we get back from Toronto. Allahu akbar, Malik.

The IKEA bag is a particularly nice touch. I use those bags to take down recycling and to carry groceries up from the car — if they outlaw IKEA bags, the terrists have won!

(Also annoying: I have to use User Agent Switcher to claim to be IE when I use Firefox in Linux to go to gap.com, otherwise it complains and tells me that on a PC I should use Firefox 1.0 or greater. Nice failure mode.)

When you install SessionSaver, its preferences panel begins in “Simple” mode:

And already I’m scratching my head:

What on earth is that, and what is it doing in my title bar? If I switch windows and then try to alt-tab back, I won’t have any idea what that is. Even worse, if I opened it accidentally, I still don’t know what it is, because even if I read the “title” which has inexplicably migrated down into the window itself, I find that I am running

You know, ss nightly asterisk 28! Silly user.

Once I figure out what the window is, the single setting it exposes is straightforward enough: Should it restore my browser settings when I start up? But wait — if I uncheck this, does SessionSaver do anything at all? That’s what the extension is for, after all. And Firefox already lets me turn extensions on and off in the extensions panel itself, so what’s special here? SessionSaver had the chance to have a “simple” mode with no preferences at all, and missed.

That said, I lied to you above: there is more than one setting being exposed here. Up in the top corner we see an equivalence sign, ≡, beside the word “Simple”. That ≡ is a button that switches the preferences panel into Expert mode! Expert mode is truly a sight to behold:

As you can see, a SessionSaver Expert can configure a lot more, including some extra features in the Automatic section we saw earlier. (Now we know that a greyed-out word is a section heading, even though every other Firefox extension separates sections like so:

But there’s no originality that way.) The new options in the pulldown beside “Every startup, from” are “My last session” and “Default”. At first I thought this would let you choose between Firefox profiles (not that that made a great deal of sense either), but I could find no way to make anything appear in that menu other than “My last session” and “Default”. (Anyone know what it is for?)

I also like how the preference there lets me tell SessionSaver what I would like to do. I hope it is friendly and will do what I like.

You can see another ≡ beside the “…But ask me first” sub-option there. It’s another hidden menu:

Every click of the ≡ cycles through the options: “at shutdown” (which asks you if you want to save your session at shutdown or clear the saved session, not whether to restore it at startup), “startup + shutdown”, which also asks if you wish to restore on startup, and blank, which actually means “at startup”, and which prompts you to either restore or clear your saved session at startup. The application does get one thing right, by using verbs in the dialog presented on shutdown and startup when that option is enabled:

and finally it admits to being SessionSaver in the title bar. But what is “bluefyre”?

The “Manual Access” section of the preferences panel is relatively straightforward, even if the wording is a bit awkward (“clear away”, “join into one”), but then we hit “Save a session-backup on shutdown”. Is that a manual option? Is it different somehow from the “But ask me first (on shutdown)” in the Automatic section? As it turns out, it’s an automatic save, but it lets you save to a session other than the one the Automatic section uses. I still don’t know how to get it to display more than “Default” there.

The next section brings ≡ to its next level: there’s one at the end of the section heading itself, and clicking it changes the section heading from “SnapBack Menu” to “SnapBack Chronological”:

but the options in the section don’t change! It’s not two sets of options, because if I check “And windows” when the heading reads “SnapBack Menu”, and then change to “Snapback Chronological”, it stays checked — and then if I uncheck it and change back to “SnapBack Menu”, it stays unchecked! I was completely unable to figure out what difference the distinction in the section header made. One or the other or both apparently lets me “re-open” tabs and maybe windows. The scare quotes make me wonder what actually happens. I didn’t expect a session saver to do anything about re-opening tabs during a session.

Lastly, we have the Sync section, which is apparently awaiting setup but without any indication as to what needs setting up, or how to go about doing so. On a lark I clicked “(awaiting setup)”:

Ah, it’s a puzzle, and I found the secret door! Well, these additional options are straightforward: I can sync my sessions to an iDisk or DAV store. But even if I complete those fields, the quick-sync options stay grayed out. It turns out that those options will remain grayed out forever, because they’re not options at all — they’re buttons you can click to store or retrieve a session from the configured sync destination! Only because they turn red on mouseover did I realize that they were clickable at all.

I accidentally left “Auto sync” checked and the settings unconfigured, and was presented with this dialog, twice:

(There was apparently a sale on punctuation that day.)

I love the idea of being able to save and restore sessions, and while I could either put up with Simple mode not doing exactly what I want, or massaging the settings in Expert mode to avoid sessions being restored when I want to start fresh, but trying to navigate these preferences has informed me that I’m no SessionSaver expert. Luckily Firefox’s “uninstall this extension” feature is easy to navigate.