Monday, July 18, 2005

GreatNews firefox

 GreatNews, my current favourite RSS reader from CurioStudio, has a minor niggle, which leads to yet another niggle. This is a guide to fixing both of them.

GreatNews embeds Internet Explorer within itself to display the stories you want to click and read. Not only are the page load times slower for some weird reason this way, it also leaves you open to numerous attacks due the holes in IE. Besides, the cool crowd use Firefox these days and we are like uber cool.

This can of course be fixed by making Firefox your default browser and checking the 'Open RSS links in default browser' option in GreatNews.

That leads to problem number two, the default behaviour for Firefox is to open the link in 'the most recent tab/window,' which can be a pain, if you, like me, run through your list of feeds clicking away the entries you want to keep open for later reading.

To fix that issue change the 'Tabbed Browsing' preferences in the 'Advanced' options settings for Firefox to 'a new tab in the most recent window' and we are all ready to go.

Life is still not perfect though. GreatNews is not consistent with its behaviour of opening the links in the default browser. It will still open the odd link within itself and every time I click on a link, the window focus is given away to the application which opens it.

Not quite the end of the world, but irritating niggles all the same.