May I suggest for your slow RSS issues that you set your prefs to expire old RSS articles after a week, two weeks if you have to, longer if need be. Safari having to store and track the state of multiple RSS feeds can slow it down over time.

This is the same way that storing your browsing history can slow things down beyond a certain number of entries. Clearing your history can often make Safari go from turtle to race rabbit.

All RSS and history items are stored in a “plist” file, which is a single file, with multiple entries in a special format called XML. The XML is further optimized by converting to a binary format, for speed in parsing the file.

Regardless of the optimizations, a file is still a file, it still must be read, and if it is large, reading it will take time. The larger it is, the more there is to read off disk, and also translate from computer readable formatting to human readable formatting. After read into memory, there is still the CPU overhead of parsing all that data.

Keeping your RSS and History lists as short as possible but still giving you the access you need is the goal. Someone who is as heavy an RSS reader as yourself may want to look into a dedicated RSS reader. These offer local caching of each article. Generally speaking, number of RSS items is no longer an issue, items they are stored in a database, not a file, like the former mentioned method.

NetNewsWire is the go to RSS reader on the Mac, but I also find the simple Apple Mail, which in your prefs for Safari can be instructed to become your new default RSS reader. Before this was a feature, I wrote a script that parsed my RSS feed and delivered each entry asa single email. I was essentially mimicking what Apple has now provided. I the new workflow.

With RSS items now each becoming an email message, I can keep RSS items as long as I like. Email clients are designed to save messages forever, and in large quantities. The bold messages are ones I have not read, the plain ones have been read. But you get other added bonuses that RSS alone does not offer. Bonuses such as sort by date, sort by subject, maintain a complete RSS archive only limited by the size of your available storage space.

RSS in email is really nice, as it is now much more database backed, meaning better storage and caching routines to aid performance. Each RSS entry looks like, and is an email; you read them as such. This means, you could have 10,000+ RSS items to little or no speed degradation. The entries are now no more than emails in a folder, though the contents of the email happen to be RSS data. I have my first email ever, dating back to the year 1997. I save almost all my emails, minus spam, order confirmations, and other misc junk I will not need long term. I am probably nearing a million messages. Apple Mail messages, and all the 10’s of thousands of RSS items I have collected, don’t appear to cause any detectable performance degradation.

There are also a number of RSS reader improvements making their way to the new Safari 5 extensions scene. These extensions are going to be amazing, and the ones out already are impressive. Extensions will add little bits of functionality to Safari.

So far, every “FireFox can do this, but Safari can’t” has probably been met with an equivalent new extension. Extensions have only been publicly available for less than a week now, and the count of available ones is well over 100.

Greasemonkey, FireFox extensions, plus Chrome extensions are apparently all easily converted. The documentation makes mentions to it, however, the docs are noted as a work in progress, or a technology preview, meaning the specifics are not yet written or explained. Someone who is versed in extension/plug-in writing will solve that here shortly though.

And don’t forget, once you are out of RSS and reading the article, there is the new Safari ‘Reader’ view, which makes any web page look more like a page out of a book. No ads, clean type, visually appealing, much easier to read, no distractions. This is probably to the detriment of our advertising, but this site is about the users, not the ads

Thanks for taking the time to make a comment, we appreciate your involvement.

I think you may be looking at this wrong. The first thing to understand, is that Safari using PhotoShop as the RSS reader is is absolutely not the fault of Apple, your iMac, Safari, or anything at all related to Apple. At least, I don’t believe that to be the case.

Do a quick google search for “Adobe installer”, “Adobe installer sucks”, “Adobe installer broken” etc and you will quickly learn, by Adobes own blog posts and admission, that Adobe has an admittedly poor installer/uninstaller/upgrader. This is supposed to be resolved in the CS6 release I believe, where we finally get a package based installer, and not the custom built installer Adobe uses now.

More than likely, Adobe’s installer is what changed this preference, perhaps related to why Adobe’s installers ask you to quit all running browsers before you are allowed to install their applications. If everything is not just right, all sorts of things break, I see it all the time.

If you uninstall Adobe’s stuff, (good luck with that, as their uninstaller will not remove anywhere near everything), then Safari would probably go back to working fine. Had PhotoShop never been installed, this issue more than likely would never have happened.

If you are under the impression this was in any way an intentional decision, to use PhotoShop as an RSS reader, that is incorrect. Something is not correct about how your system is, how PhotoShop was installed, or some other anomaly, which is causing this. This is not normal at all. PhotoShop does not have the protocol handlers to read RSS, so no one would ever try to set it as an RSS reader.

One could argue that the OS should not allow a RSS reader to be chosen that can’t in fact read RSS data formats, but that is a hard question to answer by just selecting an application in a menu. It is also not the responsibility of the OS to police bad developer decisions. Developers actually desire this freedom to make unusual choices if they desire.

I can assure you, a clean installation of Mac OS X will work out of the box with Safari as the default RSS reader. From your list of applications, I can tell that your machine has significant amounts of software installed. At the least, you have PhotoShop, and unless you performed a custom install and then manual cleanup after that install, Adobe has put a good amount of junk on your system.

You mention IE which tells me you are using a VM of some form, either Parallels or VirtualBox perhaps. Both of those install system level drivers to make the bridge between the OS for networking, mass storage devices, simple data transports like USB, SATA, and Firewire. And then there are the “Additional Tools” most VM’s install. Or perhaps you are dual booting into BootCamp, which also means that significant driver and kernel level software has been installed.

Without keeping a close eye on all these applications, problems can and will happen. Nothing prevents developers from writing bad software, software that causes the core software of your computer to misbehave. If you look at it from the point of view of a new installation of Mac OS X with no 3rd party apps installed, I think you will find that the platform is rather stable and usable in that state.

It is more and more common for users to be running beta software. As a result, people have come to forget that beta software can cause problems. Chrome is very much beta software, especially the Mac version, not so much the Windows version, and explicitly states that using it may cause problems from small glitches to complete data loss. It’s more than fine to run such software, but people do need to remember, just because it is from a major software player, and just because it appears to work, does not mean it will not cause adverse behavior.

What other little actions are you having problems with, I am sure we can solve those as well, or perhaps find a common theme amongst them that is related. The RSS issue with PhotoShop and Safari is a 5 second fix, I would just change the preference and things will be fine. If it somehow reverts back to PhotoShop, then you need to find out which other software you have installed that is causing this.

I know that but this was not intended to be my point (to find out what to do)

My point here simply is, I use Opera, Google Chrome, Mozilla, Yep – even the ugly IE7 and “ALL” of them can read XML RSS Feeds – but come to Safari – Safari thinks it should be read by Photoshop!

Not only is this an arrogant move by Safari (Mac) – but worse, it’s just so stupid that one would really ask … has Apple already or is it well on track – to loose it?!

There are too many of these little stupid actions my iMac takes, making me really wonder if I made the right choice moving away from Windows and into the (sour) Apple … Cheers

feed:// should map to whatever the OS thinks is set for your default RSS reader. If photoshop took over that setting, which is all very possible, then you need to change that value in one of your browsers preferences.

What does your gut tell you as a reason why other browsers can read RSS feeds – just like that and – “the all mighty Apple Safari Browser” would open every single RSS feed in …. WHAT? Photoshop???

Give me a break!

Do you perhaps have a sample url you can share?

What is probably happening is Safari, and I would imagine FireFox, and Google Chrome are all doing the the same/similar, though correct thing.

Google may do things a little different as they have a stake in RSS with their own RSS tools and readers. This is not to say they are bad in any way, quite the contrary, I find nearly all RSS readers have their merits.

The browser sees RSS formatted data, either RSS, XML, whatever, and the browser tries to do it’s best guess to display it. Browsers do a lot of guessing, web developers do not always make sites perfectly to standards. The web is sort of a messy bunch of text underneath all the pretty.

If Safari is truly showing a website as an RSS feed, then you are only a few things that could be happening, which would be consistent across all browsers.

First, would be that the data is in fact RSS data, so the app is doing the correct thing.

Second, is that the http headers are sending an http redirect, or actually changing the meta header from text/html to that of an RSS feed.

I suspect you are getting a redirect. If you look at the url, I would almost bet that it is no longer http://example.com but instead, has been changed to feed://example.com

What you could try, is changing the protocol from feed:// to http://

However, the browser may just redirect you back to the feed again. This more than likely is not a browser issues, if I understand you correctly. This is a bug with the website itself.

Can you provide a sample URL? I am assuming this does not happen to all sites, but only one, or a small handful?

I hope this is helpful; with a sample url, we should be able to run some test and figure out just what is going on.

Sometimes, you can look at the url, and you will see something like &lang=en or &lang=sp and just change them to what are logical for you.

I think this post is relevant to how you will change your google reader preferences to English, or any other language for that matter.

I can only guess that your RSS feeds are being shown to you in other language fonts. Or are the words literally translated to another language? Then again, Spanish uses an English letterset, so I am not sure how this is happening.

Can you show me a screen shot of the RSS feed in another language? I am guessing you are not using Safari for RSS, but perhaps Google, which does to translation for you. You should be able to look at the feed url Google is using, and change it somewhat to alter the language.

Thanks for the info, I work in Dubai (I do not speak arabic) however anytime I tried to check the RSS for news everything comes up in Arabic language, back in Mexico everything appeared in spanish, how can I change the language of the RSS to show me the info in english or spanish?

RSS sucks. If you or somebody else wants it fine; but I should be able to block it, in my compute. Ultimately, there is a way: Never turn the iMac on.

If we get a chance to continue on this topic, Apple Mail would be one of those topics. I believe you can remote and RSS feeds from Apple Mail by control clicking on the feed icon, and deleting it. That should stop those feeds from appearing.

From there, you should set your default RSS reader to Safari, which will be in the RSS tab of the preferences to Apple Mail. That should stop new RSS items from showing up in your email application.

I do want to clear up that since we have not covered Apple Mail, we have not covered RSS in Apple Mail, and I do not believe we suggested any way to add RSS feeds to Apple Mail. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks

That is VERY true for RSS and everything about it. Something you missed. I had to call Apple Support to get Apple to stop putting many RSS things everyday in my email.

I am a new Mac user, thanks to VIsta, but not really a convert.

That being said, you can in fact pass a user/pass in a url, but it will be exposed publicly to whoever can see it, and will show up in your apache logs.

feed://user:pass@example.com/feed.rss

Adjust accordingly.

You should use the Send Feedback option, the more people who do, the better chance you have of making it happen.

There is a small tip in this post that will show you how to sort bookmarks in Safari alphabetically. Certainly not the most convenient, but it does get the job done.

Now, if you have any influence with Apple, make the develope team give the user the option to browse to a folder or subfolder when adding a bookmark and letting user reorder bookmarks alphabetically.

Tiny changes that will help users who have hundreds of bookmarks…and adding Live Bookmarks (ala Mail)to Safari!