Google Reader and Firefox

Assalamu alaikum, have started playing with Google Reader and Firefox, both of which I’d tried before but for some reason just couldn’t really get into at the time. I’m not sure if it’s because Jaws didn’t work as well with them at the time, if those programs didn’t have the features I liked, or some of both.

At any rate, I really like Google Reader. With the exception of the Gambian news sites I find myself visiting on at least a semi-regular basis (which would be The Gambia Journal, The Gambia Echo, and <a href=”http://www.senegambianews.com”), which don’t to my knowledge have RSS feeds, I can put most of my blogs and news sites all in one place, and I’m finding that doing that saves quite a bit of time. I like using Google Reader because no matter where I go, or which computer I use, all of my feeds/sites will be in one places. And that is cool.

I’m also playing with Firefox, and it seems that Jaws has implemented a lot of the IE commands into the Firefox browser, so it makes the transition from IE to Firefox that much easier. In fact, I don’t have the usual frustration that I have when moving from one program to another.

I really like the add-ons, and I don’t find the tabbed browsing as bulky and unwieldy as it seems to be with IE, as sometimes if you open up a bunch of tabs in ie, the browser kinda has a fit and crashes. Maybe it’s a Jaws thing or maybe it’s my computer I don’t know.

Since I’ve not really taken Firefox through it’s paces yet, I can’t really tell you any more pros or cons, except when you’re using Gmail, for example, when you’re in standard mail view, with Firefox you still have to route the Jaws cursor to the PC cursor when you want to click on a message to read it, whereas with IE you don’t have to do this anymore. So it seems that the ajax support with Jaws and Firefox is lacking somewhat. Also, when you click on something in Gmail, while in Firefox, it seems to take a while to update itself, or I should say, for Jaws to update for you. For example, if I hit archive or delete on a message, it takes it a while to show that a message has been archived and that it’s gone back to your inbox or your label if you’re looking at a group of labelled messages.

Perhaps this is oemthing that Freedom Scientific could address in future releases, or maybe it’s a firefox issue, I don’t know, but these are just minor annoyances to me really. But it would still be nice if I didn’t have to take these extra steps to click on these kinds of links, as I don’t have to in IE.