Christopher Finke writes about software, woodworking, and other creative endeavors.

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:

  1. You can now sort your feeds by three different criteria:
    Sort by Name, Date Updated, or Date Added
  2. 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.

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18 responses to “Feed Sidebar 4.0 Released”

  1. Feed Sidebar User Avatar
    Feed Sidebar User

    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!

    Reply
  2. ahuman Avatar
    ahuman

    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?

    Reply
  3. evelyn carbonell Avatar
    evelyn carbonell

    I think 4.0 is a good thing and holds much more
    memory..

    Reply
  4. TwoYaks Avatar
    TwoYaks

    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

    Reply
  5. atrigent Avatar
    atrigent

    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.

    Reply
  6. Martial Arts Dude Avatar
    Martial Arts Dude

    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

    Reply
  7. Heart Patient Diet Avatar
    Heart Patient Diet

    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.

    Reply
  8. HDTV Reviews Avatar
    HDTV Reviews

    It sure has a memory leak and it drives me crazy!!!!!!!!!!!

    Reply
  9. Dan the Samsung HDTV Man Avatar
    Dan the Samsung HDTV Man

    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?

    Reply
  10. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    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

    Reply
  11. NF Avatar
    NF

    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.

    Reply
  12. JK Avatar
    JK

    Hello

    First off, I love Feed Sidebar!

    Second, I noticed with this recent update that when I open the Sidebar, all of the feed threads are open. I’m hoping this behavior can be changed back to closed threads.

    Thank you!

    Reply
  13. mango Avatar
    mango

    The current version does not seem to work with firefox v3.6.4 under windows 7.. the icon is gone from next to the address bar, but i can still open the sidebar using ctrl-shift-f ..
    mango.

    Reply
  14. mango Avatar
    mango

    OK.. I upgraded to Firefox V3.6.6, and it’s working fine again ow.. whatever the problem was has disappeared, and the icon is back visible again.

    Reply
  15. mango Avatar
    mango

    I have one feature request PLEASE(?!).. I’m subscribed to well over 60 feeds, with option to update every 30 minutes. My internet connection is slooow, if I leave my computer on all night (often), in the morning I find the feed sidebar extension has dozens of the “xxxx blog: Feed has no content.” messages. In order to clear those messages I’ve sometimes had to click about 40 times or more on the little “x”.. It’d be mightily appreciated if there could be somehow incorporated a way to clear all those messages with one click..

    Thanks for listening, and kind regards,
    Mango.

    Reply
  16. mango Avatar
    mango

    Even better, would be make it an option to turn off and on those “Feed has no content” messages.

    thanks,
    mango.

    Reply
  17. kitsuneymg Avatar
    kitsuneymg

    4.4.2
    Minefield
    OSX.6

    Error: FEEDSIDEBAR.prefs is null
    Source File: chrome://feedbar/content/sidebar.js
    Line: 37

    Error: frame.docShell is undefined
    Source File: chrome://feedbar/content/sidebar.js
    Line: 10

    Reply
  18. Cornelsen Avatar
    Cornelsen

    Feed Sidebar is a great tool but on Firefox 4 beta (all Versions)there are some UI Bugs.

    First: If u right Click on a Feed the Menu is 100% transparent

    Second: The Update logo has no icon!

    Reply

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