Opera and RSS

Many months after the original prediction but only several weeks after my denial a major(ish) browser has added RSS intergration into the browser.

Unfortunately it’s a little lame. I’d have thought that the big plus of putting this stuff in the browser would be the ease of subscription that would arise. Sadly this isn’t the case. You can subscribe to a feed by clicking on it’s link which is good but it doesn’t support feed autodiscovery so unless you track down the feed as a real link you’re sunk. If you’re masochistic, you can also subscribe from the links window (which lists all links on a page) but it only flags a link as a potential feed if it has a .xml extension.

Reading feed is done in the mail window and works adequately. It’s a standard three pane view so there’s not much to say about it.

The real downside though is one that I can’t see an easy work around for. If you close the browser, your feeds aren’t updated. Most dedicated feed readers I know run continuously and put notifications in the System Tray / Dock. When you close Opera, it’s gone and that’s the end of your feed updating till you run it again. That’s OK for a small number of feeds, but unwieldy when the subscription list runs to the hundreds.

Oh and no Atom support.

Close, but no cigar.