Two

I know I’m a little behind the times here. I was aware of this about five minutes after it happened, but I haven’t had time to blog about it until tonight. Firefox 2 was officially released over a week ago.

To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed with this release. Sure, it has a slick new look and some new bells and whistles (e.g., in-line spell check, session restore, and anti-phishing), but it’s lacking in one area that makes all the difference for me: XML feed support. To be fair, it’s got better support for feeds than Firefox 1.5, but this is one area where I’m sad to say Internet Explorer 7 is winning.

Lifehacker already voiced a few of my complaints about Firefox 2’s feed support (or lack thereof), but one thing they failed to mention is that Firefox 2 has poor support for third-party feed readers. I use Mozilla Thunderbird to manage my feeds, and, paradoxically, Firefox can’t add feed subscriptions to Thunderbird. This bug really should’ve been a version 2 release blocker, but somehow it sailed right through without being noticed. Hopefully they’ll fix this bug in a 2.0.1 release or something soon.

Other than that (and a minor unsettledness about the new look), I do love the browser and recommend that everyone download it as soon as possible. Happy browsing!

MagpieRSS Caching

Ever since I installed MagpieRSS on my server (it powers my del.icio.us sidebar links), the site loads a lot slower. I’m pretty sure it’s happening because Magpie’s caching isn’t enabled. I’d like to have caching anyway to prevent my site from overloading del.icio.us—not that it would with my piddly traffic, but it seems incredibly impolite to ping someone else’s server every time my site loads.

I’ve gone through the readme files and tried the steps outlined for setting up caching, but it doesn’t seem to be working correctly. If anyone knows anything (or can figure anything out) about MagpieRSS, please let me know. Thanks. End mark