Jack Hardcastle

Why is it actually impossible to add RSS feeds to Safari when all you possess is the URL? Don’t believe me? Try it.

Other RSS readers let you happily “Add a Subscription” to you heart’s content. In Safari, you can’t do it, no matter how hard you try. As near as I can tell, Safari’s only option to add RSS feeds is to browse to the site the RSS feed is hosted on and pray that the webmaster is smart enough to have done the necessary code to put the blue RSS button in the address bar.

Seriously, if I know what RSS is and I want to use it, you can bet I know how to handle a real URL and locate the proper feed for the site I’m browsing. And what about sites like, oh, I don’t know, every major publication, TV station, and news corporation, that offer dozens or hundreds of sub-feeds based on the category of news: local, breaking, sports, etc.? How does that one little blue button help me at all?

So, Safari, you earn an F as a news reader. You also earn an F for being stupid about your Google search key command. And those are two reasons that you won’t find the compass icon in my Dock.