#Safari rss reader mac

#Safari rss reader mac

Even this didn’t work as expected. If Safari has no idea what RSS reader to use, a “No RSS reader is installed” message should appear when you select an RSS feed, prompting you to pick an RSS reader from the Mac App Store. I tried to get it to shift to NetNewsWire (my preferred RSS reader) as my default RSS choice, but it would not allow me to do so.Įventually, I selected RCDefaultApp’s “Disable” option, hoping that would act to “turn off” the program. Unfortunately, RCDefaultApp (which has not been updated since 2009) does not seem entirely compatible with Mountain Lion. This is where the choice of Fluid had originated. With Safari no longer accepting RSS feeds, RCDefaultApp was attempting to find a substitute. I had installed RCDefaultApp, a third-party System Preferences pane that lets you assign default apps to various functions. What a mess! By this point, I was thinking: “How can anyone view all of this as an improvement from how things worked in Safari 5?” However, it turned out that the mess was not entirely Apple’s fault. Safari next attempted to shunt RSS feeds to another app, again one that rejected the RSS feed. As I was no longer using Fluid, I decided to delete the app, to see what would happen next. The problem was that Fluid didn’t want to accept this assignment hence the error. I assumed that Safari, now that it was not opening RSS links anymore, had somehow selected Fluid as an RSS reader. How unhelpful! Fortunately, I had a reasonable idea as to what was going on.

It claimed an “Infinite Loop” error had been detected:Ĭlicking the “Send URL to Safari” button simply regenerated a new copy of the message. So what did happen to my Safari RSS requests in Mountain Lion? Instead of going to Mail, an odd error message appeared. Making matters worse, when I launched Mail, I found that all of my previously saved RSS items had vanished. Essentially, RSS support has been entirely removed from OS X. It turns out that, in Mountain Lion, RSS support is gone from Safari and Mail. I selected an RSS link in Safari 6, expecting it to go to Mail. Once more, I was surprised by the result. Rather than bother, I just let the situation stand for the moment, accepting Mail as the recipient of RSS links originating in Safari.Ī few weeks later, I updated to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. I knew there were ways to work-around this. And I certainly didn’t want Mail cluttered up with hundreds of RSS items. As I didn’t use Mail as my email client, I didn’t want these RSS feeds shunted to Mail. This is when I realized that RSS support in Safari was gone. The first time I selected an RSS link in Safari 6, it automatically shunted me to OS X Mail, where it opened each RSS summary as a separate item (as if each one was an email message). Browser RSS support is also perfect for when a link to an RSS feed appears in an web article you can open the link without having to switch applications or subscribe to the feed.]įor me, the rumblings started when I updated to Safari 6 while still running OS X Lion. For example, I have a few RSS feeds saved as bookmarks, allowing me (until now) to quickly check on them directly from Safari.

While most people (including myself) don’t use Safari as a complete substitute for a dedicated reader, Safari’s RSS support provides a convenient way to open RSS URLs (feed://) without having to switch to a separate application.

NetNewsWire is an example of a popular RSS reader on the Mac. This can save time and hassle compared to having to separately visit each site to check for updates. From an “RSS reader” application, users can track these summaries, deciding which items to click through to read in full. Even Apple has a page listing its own RSS feeds. [Background note: RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a way for a regularly updated site to publish standardized summaries of its latest postings.

Worse, anyone who now tries to access an RSS feed from Safari 6 is likely to wind up more dazed and confused than before. Apple…you’ve got some ‘splainin to do! What were you thinking when you made the wrong-headed decision to remove RSS support from Safari 6 and OS X Mountain Lion? You took a useful feature, one that was working well and causing no harm, and trashed it.