Friday, January 13, 2006

Thunderbird 1.5 RSS Engine has taken a step back

I am really disappointed in Mozilla Thunderbirds latest release 1.5 and it's built in RSS Reader.  It has basically taken steps back in terms of progress.

Let's take Robert Scoble's blog for example.  In 1.0.7 I could read the whole story within Thunderbird now I only get a description and have to read the whole story on Scobles site.  This defeats the purpose of RSS.  I originally thought Scoble changed his feed but looking at the raw RSS XML I see there is a description element and a content element description is before content and description holds the summary lines that I am getting.  There is no way to change the feed (that I know of) in Thunderbird to say display content in the body and not description.  Again this is something that has changed in 1.5 and it made the RSS engine worse.

Let's look at BrandLogic's Internal Blogs I use at the office.  I post daily on my blog what it is I do during the day simple list multiple lines.  I don't add any html or anything just drop in line item after line item.  In 1.0.7 they would show up as I typed them. In 1.5 they show up as one line.  Talk about a step back in progress.

Other bugs I have found:
  • Editing a feed is not possible the text box does not allow you to type in it.
  • When you create a new feed and you right click you only get "Copy this Link" as an option not the desired "Paste."
  • When I lose my connection on my laptop (put it in hybernate or go out of the hotspot area) RSS feeds won't update without restarting Thunderbird.
These issues have made me think about switching back to 1.0.7 until 1.5 is fixed in 1.5.1.  I am not the only one who thinks this Travis Hardiman (coworker/friend [I did make this months payment right?]) tried installing yesterday and the application wouldn't open for him.  He is currently back on 1.0.7.  At the time I thought he was full of shit when he was blaming Mozilla and talking trash about how bad this version of Thunderbird is.  Well I now agree with him.  I am downgrading.

But Thunderbird 1.0.7/1.5 is still better and less bloated then Outlook, IMO.

# Friday, January 13 2006 at 11:04 AM | Comments [2]
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Friday, January 13, 2006 1:22:34 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Yeah, I second-guessed myself after installing it as well, but after finding out that this has been an unfixed bug since November of 2005 I felt better that I wasn't alone:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315224

In general I think that Thunderbird lacks big-time. It's hard to believe that it's made by the same people who made Firefox. It seems to still have lots of quirkiness. I still prefer it over Outlook though since it runs faster and has less of a memory footprint while it's running.

PS: Payment received ;-)
travis
Monday, February 13, 2006 5:17:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
For what it's worth, it appears to be a problem with how RSS2 feeds are parsed. I get the full contents from an Atom feed, for example.
Doug
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