By Graham K. Rogers

I spent most of Wednesday evening installing the new version of OS X -- 10.8, Mountain Lion -- then writing about it. Although the download was slow, the installation was smooth enough and I have had no problems with the actual running itself.

I did not sleep well. While having a first look at Mountain Lion, I was shocked to see that Safari no longer supported RSS feeds. In all the reading about the new operating system version that I had seen in the last months, there had been much information about new features, but I had seen nothing about this revolution.

As I opened Safari for the first time (now version 6.0) it brought back the pages that were loaded the last time it was used. Or tried. I was met by a screen that told me "No RSS reader is installed" and "Safari can't open [the feedname] because Safari can't display RSS feeds" I was offered a link to the Mac App Store so that I could search for an RSS app.

It took a couple of seconds for this to sink in. My browser use relies heavily on access to sites using the RSS feed and then opening those pages in the browser that I want to examine further. Feeds are an efficient way to scan many news sources as I like to do daily and the technology is closely integrated into browser use. Or should be.

As I looked at that almost bare screen, my jaw dropped as I realised the implications. Even if I could find an app that handled RSS feeds in a way that suited me, I would still need the browser to read the stories and copy the links, should I need them. Why use one app efficiently when two might do?

On the Mac App Store, I was greeted by a page with 50 apps shown. Some were free and some paid. I already had one installed and had not been happy with it. Some, like The Next Web, are publication-specific. I examined a couple and downloaded the free Monotony. With this however, I need to add each of the feeds one by one and this will take some time to bring me back up to speed. I have added a few links -- trying each one in Safari, then copying the feed URL and adding it to the app -- but this is time-consuming. Thus far, with half a dozen links entered, there have been no notifications. I am unsure if it is working or if feeds themselves are broken. It is not shown in Growl or in the new Notifications Center and I can see no way to add it to either. I will be contacting the developer later. [Just as I uploaded this page, the first news item was shown: it appears to be working.]

I also had a quick look at Firefox, although I had never used this for feeds before as the way it displayed only the headline, was not enough: Safari would display several lined of text, allowing me to gauge the value of the story, like using an Abstract, without accessing the whole page. I imported bookmarks from Safari (that saved me a bit of work), but it is crashing every time I try a feed. One step forward, two steps back.

Laying there in bed, I turned over the ideas of how I might work. As an immediate means to accessing news, I could remember a number of sites that I use and open their top level pages: AppleInsider, CNET, MacDaily News as well as MacSurfer would be useful places to start. I also began thinking about words I would use to describe this and the Thesaurus in my head was working overtime. I finally dozed off.

Whatever the reasons for the change, I am left with half a browser and one that no longer lets me access the information I want on a day to day basis and in a way that integrates with my ways of working. The information page directing me to the Mac App Store is insufficient. Apple should have provided a proper solution, rather than casting me (and others of course) adrift, now having to waste time investigating suitable software to bring me back to where I had been, like Alice through the looking glass: running fast to stay in the same place. It is perhaps no coincidence that each time I reload a page in Safari, Google displays an ad for Chrome.

I am disappointed with the change here and question Apple's decision to remove the RSS facility. Rather than make things easier it is a lot harder this morning and no longer works like magic.

Whoever signed off on this?

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.