I still don't get NetNewsWire's popularity
March 22, 2007 at 10:45 PM by Dr. Drang
In looking through the visitor statistics, I’ve found NetNewsWire to be the third most popular browser for hits on this site—well, fourth most popular if you include “Unknown.” It trails Internet Explorer and Firefox, but comes in a few tenths of a percent ahead of Safari. (I confess I have no idea what an IE user would see in this blog. I tend to think the automated comment spambots are presenting themselves as IE.)
I tried NetNewsWire for a week about a year ago. It worked well, but it didn’t bowl me over. And since I read feeds on two different machines, I figured Bloglines would be a better fit.
But with all these people using it, I figured NetNewsWire was worth checking again. I was happy to see that it could sync with an online NewsGator account, making it easier to use from multiple machines. I downloaded the trial version, set up a NewGator account, and have been using it for a couple of days.
I still don’t get it. Using Bloglines with Safari still seems better to me. There is, certainly, less UI polish to Bloglines; full-fledged applications may always have that advantage over web applications. But Bloglines is faster at updating feeds and means one less open application eating up my system resources.
It’s not that I’m wedded to Bloglines. Google Reader or NewsGator or some as-yet-unknown web-based reader may someday take Bloglines’ place. But I don’t think I’ll be running the NetNewsWire experiment again.
