Brief 2.5.5 (Solution Offered and Accepted)

[John Liebson]

I know that this is not the usual location for discussing extensions, but Brief is not active on mozillaZine, and there is very little traffic about it in other locations that I can find.

I am having problems with it when used with Firefox 58.x and Windows 10, and wonder if any users here have any advice. I find it is often very slow to load a new set of RSS feeds, often taking a minute or so, and equally slow in marking all feeds in a given group as read; ironically, one group that is particularly slow is Firefox Extensions, which often take as much as thirty seconds to be marked even with as few as six unread items so that I can go to the next of my set of feeds.

I have tried running Brief as the only active extension; that did not help. Yesterday, I created a new profile, copied my Fx bookmarks file in to the new profile, so that my rss feeds would be available, and installed Brief 2.5.5; to my dismay, Brief does not find the the bookmarks. Frustrated, I created one new rss feed, which exists, but Brief insists that although the new feed shows when I load Brief when it shows that I have new unread items, the extension says that there are no feeds, not even the one that it says exists.

As always, assistance, hints, instructions, incantations, magic spells, `whatevers' are welcome.

[LIMPET235]

Hello John,
Most probably the best place to ask for assistance & "give/receive feedback" would be the author's Help/Support site,
that is, of course, if no-one here can help.
ref; > https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-brief/6514

[John Liebson]

Hello John,
Most probably the best place to ask for assistance & "give/receive feedback" would be the author's Help/Support site,
that is, of course, if no-one here can help.
ref; > https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/support-brief/6514

Thanks. That is not a site that I have seen listed anywhere else; why, I have no idea, of course. I shall go there.

[LIMPET235]

Hi,
Just to let you know how to get to "the" site...
The link is available on the D/L page, on the left hand side....down a tad, under the "More Info" section.
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

Good luck.

[John Liebson]

Hi,
Just to let you know how to get to "the" site...
The link is available on the D/L page, on the left hand side....down a tad, under the "More Info" section.
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

Good luck.

So it is, and I think I know why I missed it: There are two links there, and I probably clicked on the first one, which sent me to GitHub, a site of no meaning to me, so I likely just gave up. Nonetheless, I am surprised that the actual support site is not shown elsewhere, while the GitHub link is.

GitHub is no use to me: I don't got no hubs, and don't want to git none....

[Happy112]

Hi John Liebson !

Should 'Brief' keep disappointing you, maybe you'd like to give this one a try :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search

Just in case : under 'More Information' there's a 'Support Email' ....

[John Liebson]

Hi John Liebson !

Should 'Brief' keep disappointing you, maybe you'd like to give this one a try :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search

Just in case : under 'More Information' there's a 'Support Email' ....

First of all, and most important, I do not trust anyone who claims to be happy....

That having been taken care of, thanks for the link; I had not heard of that program, but as I had been using Brief for so long, and as it worked well for me prior to Fx 57, I had never searched for a new reader save for a short interval when Brief did not work at all; at least I sort of recall that being the reason for my having searched, and what I used in the interim I did not like at all.

I've installed Feedbro, inserted one URL, and shall give it a test. I am so used to Brief that I'd prefer not to change, but if it's (please note the proper use of the apostrophe, unlike the possessive `its') going to prove to be a nuisance, then I shall replace it, likely with Feedbro.

I wonder if I can find something to replace my wife and son....

[Happy112]

First of all, and most important, I do not trust anyone who claims to be happy....

'Happy' is a fairy tale character .....

I am so used to Brief that I'd prefer not to change, but if it's (please note the proper use of the apostrophe, unlike the possessive `its') going to prove to be a nuisance, then I shall replace it, likely with Feedbro.

I hear you - I don't like change(s) either. I hope Brief won't let you down (or rather: the developer).

Yes, I know the difference between 'its' and it's (as in : it is).

I wonder if I can find something to replace my wife and son....

I'm lost for words - in tears ....

[John Liebson]

First of all, and most important, I do not trust anyone who claims to be happy....

'Happy' is a fairy tale character .....

Happy is one of the Seven Dwarfs

I am so used to Brief that I'd prefer not to change, but if it's (please note the proper use of the apostrophe, unlike the possessive `its') going to prove to be a nuisance, then I shall replace it, likely with Feedbro.

I hear you - I don't like change(s) either. I hope Brief won't let you down (or rather: the developer).

Yes, I know the difference between 'its' and it's (as in : it is).

Ah, one of the apparently very few people who know about "its."

As for Brief, I just might replace it: While it would take a bit of effort to get used to Feedbro, I used its bookmark import system to get all of my Brief sources into Feedbro very quickly, I am moving all of them into the folders I mimicked from Brief, and I have looked at all of my most recent feeds, which all worked very quickly. If I can use Feedbro this easily, I might not bother to try to fix Brief; it may be time to move on.

I just recalled why I had to use something other than Brief for a while: The method it used to locate feeds had changed completely, but the instructions had not changed, so I had no idea how to restore the feeds. I finally found a source on-line about the new method, which was rather complex, but did work.

I wonder if I can find something to replace my wife and son...

I'm lost for words - in tears ....

Not to worry: When Kit was quite young, I kept trying to return him, only to find that the warranty had expired. When I am asked if he is my son, I reply that I would not have a kid like him, he is his mother's son.

[Happy112]

Yes, 'Happy' is one of the Seven Dwarfs - 'Dopey' suits me better, though. And 'Grumpy' ....

Whether you choose to stick with Brief or give Feedbro a try : I hope you'll get things to work the way you want them to.

As for the last part of your post :
There are many things I'd like to say, but this isn't the right place for it .....

[John Liebson]

Yes, 'Happy' is one of the Seven Dwarfs - 'Dopey' suits me better, though. And 'Grumpy' ....

Whether you choose to stick with Brief or give Feedbro a try : I hope you'll get things to work the way you want them to.

As for the last part of your post :
There are many things I'd like to say, but this isn't the right place for it .....

I do rather like things to work the way that I want them to, and Feedbro may well be my chosen path. Again, I thank you for calling it to my attention.

I failed to comment on one thing you said earlier about not liking change. Far from not liking that, I am a change agent. I hope I might mention a few of my accomplishments that changed things: The creation of two structural fire departments, the introduction to the structural fire protection community of a new fire suppression technology created by the US wildland fire community, a technology now adopted worldwide, and one more that I had rather forgotten about until yesterday. Without going into details,that was when I changed the entire direction of the emergency management community, which was quite unaware of the role of the fire service in emergency response before I made my input at an emergency management conference at Mount Weather, Virginia, the FEMA Emergency Operations Center; the state emergency managers were there, along with one lonesome outlier, me, the only fire service person in attendance.

Mount Weather is so secure that you can only gain admittance by invitation!

[John Liebson]

Feedbro has replaced Brief. I really don't know what is apparently so fouled up with my copy of Brief 2.5.5, but fouled up it is, giving me horrible numbers of repeated feeds, especially for the Washington Post, and causing MalwareBytes AntiMalware to block many bad sites when I am looking at BBC feeds, and showing many CNN feed titles as codes rather than text, those being its worst problems.

Given the ease with which I installed Feedbro, got it to recognize my existing feeds from Brief, etc. I have removed Brief and am now using Feedbro.

That takes care of this week: One problem solved, which is my weekly limit....