Random Developments

Quite a while ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Bloglines (in a post that actually got a few responses from their team) and, later, with stand-alone feed readers. In the end, after using Omea Reader for a while, I ended up gravitating back to Bloglines (especially after I moved to Linux on my desktop machine) and stayed happily there (but always wondering about possible missing posts…).

When the first version of Google Reader launched, I imported all my subscriptions and tried using it for a few days, but gave up; their “river of news” approach, with content from all feeds “mixed up”, did not appeal to me. Nor to many other people, it seems.

And now Google came up with the new version of Google Reader, and I’m a convert. It maintains the two-pane, “folder-like” structure of Bloglines, but in a more appealing interface. This way, I can read feeds in the order I want and still get the “continuous scroll” of the first version. A few advantages of Google Reader over Bloglines, in my opinion:

• selecting a feed doesn’t automatically mark it as read: in Bloglines, if I want/need to stop reading a feed with several articles before getting to the end, I actually need to mark every unread post as new; Google Reader only marks posts as read when they are displayed (but, unnervingly, sometimes not even then)
• similarly, selecting a feed doesn’t display all of the new articles: it loads them in blocks of 20, seamlessly (if you scroll almost to the bottom, it starts loading the next block of 20 and appends them to the page)
• the interface doesn’t keep reloading the left pane (the list of feeds) all the time; although, to be fair, it looks like Bloglines released a few changes right after Google Reader lauched that do basically this

The one thing that irks me is that Google Reader is a bit “CPU intensive”, at least in Firefox; the CPU usage goes way up every now and then, and Firefox becomes unresponsive for about one second (this is in a fast machine). Maybe that’s just me, or just Firefox; I have still to test it in other browsers. Still, so far, I’m a satisfied customer.