Feed Sidebar 4.0 Released
Feed Sidebar 4.0 has been released for all users of any previous version of Feed Sidebar, and this version has two great improvements over version 3.1:
- You can now sort your feeds by three different criteria:
- Feeds are now updated constantly, rather than all at once. So if you have 60 feeds, and you have Feed Sidebar set to update once per hour, instead of updating all 60 feeds after an hour, Feed Sidebar will now update one feed every minute. This should fix any issues users have had with Firefox locking up while feeds are being update.
You can read more about these improvements in my previous blog posts: Feed Sidebar 3.2 Beta 3: A Gentler Feed Updater, Feed Sidebar 3.2 Beta Update, and Sort your feeds in Feed Sidebar.
To upgrade to version 4.0, you can install this update from Mozilla Add-ons, or if you already have have Feed Sidebar installed, it will be automatically downloaded for you.
Christopher Finke is a software engineer. He is available for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. 
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:10 am
Hi,
I think version 4.0 has a huge memory leak with Firefox 3.5. Using it with the addon Firefox tends to use all of the availabe memory under Windows XP (up to 1.5 GB after some hours), disabling Feed Sidebar stops this problem. Otherwise the addon is really great!
July 6th, 2009 at 5:39 am
I've found that Feed Sidebar won't notify about updates if a feed doesn't have permalinks, just links to a front page. It treats them as always being read. An example is here. Any chance this could get fixed in 4.1?
July 6th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
I think 4.0 is a good thing and holds much more
memory..
July 8th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Hi,
I agree with the above poster. Feed Sidebar chews up 1.5 gigs of memory in just a few hours of running. I'm using mac OS 10.4.11 on Firefox 3.0.11
July 9th, 2009 at 6:32 am
Hi! I've been using this extension for a while, and it's mostly great. However, some comments:
This extension doesn't work well with multiple Firefox windows open. It looks as if it checks each feed once for each window open, instead of just checking it once and updating all of the windows based on that. The list of feeds/articles is not the same for each window. The little notification pop-ups are also displayed for each window, rather than for Firefox as a whole.
The other problem is this memory leak people have been reporting. I should probably do more testing, but I'm pretty sure feed sidebar is the cause.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I have not experience the memory leak you mentioned. Maybe it is because I run a different operating system? Don't think that can be the case, but I'll remmeber to disable Feed Sidebar if I experience the same problem in the future
July 13th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Ditto on the above comment, unless I'm getting some sort of memory conflict between plugins.
I may have to re-install a virgin copy of FF and try it that way, as I've 'lost control' with all the plugins already installed.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:19 am
It sure has a memory leak and it drives me crazy!!!!!!!!!!!
July 14th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Ok, so you're saying that the feeds will be updated equally over the update time frame? So if I had 120 feeds and said I wanted them updated once an hour, then a single feed will be updated every 30 seconds? Did I get that right?
July 15th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Unfortunately when I installed 4.0 it slowed my Firefox browser to a crawl. I had to disable as well.
Tom
San Diego Health Insurance
July 27th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Hi,
Feed Sidebar is great, and I use it all the time. I think it's extremely effective precisely because it's so simple and does exactly what it should.
One problem though, that started from version 4.0: I have several feeds that are in Hebrew, and all the Hebrew characters appear as gibberish. As I said, this didn't happen before version 4.0.
Here's a feed for example: http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/html/backend.php
I guess it might be a problem for you to check if you can't read Hebrew and it all looks like gibberish to you... But I wonder if you might be able to compare the original feeds source with what appears in the side bar, in order to see the problem.
I'll be happy to supply more information if I can help.
Thanks again for a great extension.