Review by Firefox user 13469213
Rated 3 out of 5
by Firefox user 13469213, 7 years agoTrying Feedbro while Brief updates to work on FF57
There's a lot of small issues here and there: lack of support for Live bookmarks (which Firefox has been using for some years now), UI unpredictability and general weirdness (Not only can't I set an exact number of minutes for scan interval, you chose to represent a year as 525600 minutes!), can't drag'n'drop links for fast feed creation, can't select multiple feeds... Mostly minor UI stuff that builds up and makes the add-on annoying to deal with, but It seems likely that they'll get fixed over time.
What really stands out is the rules system. I've got a feed that's always giving me trouble, both here and back on Brief, where marking the "don't mark updated articles as unread" checkbox solved it's hijinks, but since Feedbro lacks that I tried to solve it with rules. The hijinks this time is that every time the scan interval completes, a single, old article reappears as brand new, and my gut feeling was to use the rules to compare if the time at which it was detected was more recent than the earliest article. Sadly, you can't compare articles, nor check any kind of time atribute. So as a emporary measure I've placed a rule to mark all updates from said feed as read, and not notify me of said updates. Bummer.
Then there's another feed that usually posts multiple articles at once, to be read in a particular order. Since notifications are per article, when the update hits I get spammed with notifications, and was about to set a rule to check wetherarticles have been posted within seconds of each other, only to remember I can't check that. Bummer again.
Those are just two specific cases, what Im really trying to get at is that the rules system has the potential to become an incredibly powerful tool.
TL;DR: Feedbro really shows potential to become great, but right now it's just fine and usable. Won't be using it yet, but will definitely come back to check again in a few months to see what's changed.
There's a lot of small issues here and there: lack of support for Live bookmarks (which Firefox has been using for some years now), UI unpredictability and general weirdness (Not only can't I set an exact number of minutes for scan interval, you chose to represent a year as 525600 minutes!), can't drag'n'drop links for fast feed creation, can't select multiple feeds... Mostly minor UI stuff that builds up and makes the add-on annoying to deal with, but It seems likely that they'll get fixed over time.
What really stands out is the rules system. I've got a feed that's always giving me trouble, both here and back on Brief, where marking the "don't mark updated articles as unread" checkbox solved it's hijinks, but since Feedbro lacks that I tried to solve it with rules. The hijinks this time is that every time the scan interval completes, a single, old article reappears as brand new, and my gut feeling was to use the rules to compare if the time at which it was detected was more recent than the earliest article. Sadly, you can't compare articles, nor check any kind of time atribute. So as a emporary measure I've placed a rule to mark all updates from said feed as read, and not notify me of said updates. Bummer.
Then there's another feed that usually posts multiple articles at once, to be read in a particular order. Since notifications are per article, when the update hits I get spammed with notifications, and was about to set a rule to check wetherarticles have been posted within seconds of each other, only to remember I can't check that. Bummer again.
Those are just two specific cases, what Im really trying to get at is that the rules system has the potential to become an incredibly powerful tool.
TL;DR: Feedbro really shows potential to become great, but right now it's just fine and usable. Won't be using it yet, but will definitely come back to check again in a few months to see what's changed.
Developer response
posted 7 years agoThank you for your review and observations.
We'll fix the display of the hard to read intervals. It's true that it's difficult to understand what 525600 minutes stands for. :)
We have noticed that a lot of people who used a different reader before have their subscriptions as Live Bookmarks. Unfortunately the Firefox WebExtension implementation does not let you read Live Bookmarks via the API which makes it impossible for the add-on to use or to import them. We are hopeful to see a change in the API but this will most likely take some time. See Bugzilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418257
Unfortunately there are some feeds that don't follow the rules or behave in somehow peculiar manner. Usually the best option is to notify the feed provider that they should fix the feed rather than trying to fix N different readers to deal with their problems. If e.g. feed posts several articles with the same date stamp and you still want to see notifications, how should the reader behave? Show just the first? Show none? Show all but with larger intervals in between?
We'll fix the display of the hard to read intervals. It's true that it's difficult to understand what 525600 minutes stands for. :)
We have noticed that a lot of people who used a different reader before have their subscriptions as Live Bookmarks. Unfortunately the Firefox WebExtension implementation does not let you read Live Bookmarks via the API which makes it impossible for the add-on to use or to import them. We are hopeful to see a change in the API but this will most likely take some time. See Bugzilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418257
Unfortunately there are some feeds that don't follow the rules or behave in somehow peculiar manner. Usually the best option is to notify the feed provider that they should fix the feed rather than trying to fix N different readers to deal with their problems. If e.g. feed posts several articles with the same date stamp and you still want to see notifications, how should the reader behave? Show just the first? Show none? Show all but with larger intervals in between?