A week to go for Google Reader – and… why is Feedly taking liberties with Chrome?

G Reader shuts down in a week.

I’ve been trying Feedly, but and have been trying to love it, but it’s annoying in a couple of significant ways.

Firstly, after clicking on a feed, I want to use the cursor down or Page Down key to move through the items in that feed. Unlike G Reader, Feedly doesn’t put the focus in the right place. Drives me up the wall.

Secondly, it’s embedding itself in multiple places in Chrome. First it put an icon of itself in the bottom-right of every browser tab (which even shows up in print outs, would you believe?)… and just in the last few days it’s started creating its own tab, which doesn’t even have a close icon on it. Is this conceited or what?

Feedly embeds itself into Chrome

Frankly this does not bode well for my future with Feedly, if they’re going to take liberties like this.

Perhaps it’s time to look at alternatives — even if they don’t have accompanying smartphone/iPad apps.

Anybody tried The Old Reader?

Any other good ones which are as close to Google Reader as possible?

4 thoughts on “A week to go for Google Reader – and… why is Feedly taking liberties with Chrome?

  1. Marcus

    I switched from Google Reader to The Old Reader a month or two ago, and haven’t found anything to annoy yet about the UI, but I have encountered a handful of short maintenance outages that prevent me from accessing the site.

  2. Andrew

    I am using Old Reader. I can’t see how to file under my own titles, such as UK, or PT, or Sydney, that were imported from Google Reader. After a couple of months, I am happy enough with it. Initially it seemed slow to pick up posts, but it is much better now. I initially tried Feedly and I did not like it and I did not like the way it added buttons and things to my browser. Blogspot seems to have added a facility to its own reader, I think including non Blogger sites, such as WordPress. I have not checked. I am happy with Old Reader.

  3. Tony

    Since you wrote this they have removed both the pin and floating toolbar. One great thing about Feedly is how quickly they respond to their users.

  4. Lachlan Wetherall

    I’ve been using “The Old Reader” for 2 months now and I’m very happy with it. Its quite close to what Google Reader used to do – plain and simple, not complicated by fanciness that I don’t need. Performance was quite slow in the early stages when they had to cope with a sudden huge influx of new users. Performance is OK now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a dip when Google Reader goes away and more new users migrate over.

    The only issue I’ve had with “The Old Reader” is when I occasionally read posts via Safari on my iPhone, when I next access “The Old Reader” from a browser on a computer, the posts I marked as read on the iPhone still show up as unread. Not sure if it is an iPhone or “The Old Reader” problem.

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