Bloglines and Tabbrowser Extensions Workaround

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Tue, 05/11/2004 - 2:40pm.

I waited a few weeks until I upgraded my version of Firefox. Last time when I upgraded it was a horrible experience leading to many hours of frustration.

This time I played it safe, which is a drastic contrast to how I was back in the day. In those days I used to rip my PC apart once a week to try something new. That's fodder for another entry.

The upgrade worked great! The Firefox folks have created a well documented, easy to understand process. More importantly, it's automated. The last remaining pain is having to reinstall your extensions, but the new process implemented with .9 should make that history.

I have a long list of extensions I use and I was surprised to see all of them install and work without an issue.

After the configuration was complete I loaded up my homepage, which is Bloglines. Clicking on my folder list on the left produced no action in the right frame. Not good.

There began a two hour jaunt to find out the issue. It turns out that Bloglines knows about the issue:

With the release of Mozilla's Firefox 0.9 browser, some people have been reporting problems using the browser with Bloglines. We believe the problem only happens to people who have upgraded from the 0.8 release of Firefox, and who were using the tabbed browser extension. If you are using Firefox and are having problems with Bloglines or other sites, disable the tabbed browser extension, or do a clean install of Firefox 0.9. The tabbed browser extension is not required with the new version of Firefox.

Hmmm, I wonder if the author of Tabbrowser Extensions knows about the issue? Yes, he knows Tabbrowser Extensions doesn't work with Bloglines.

As I looked into the issue further I learned the following:

1) The recent changes to Bloglines made the situation worse.
2) The recent version of Tabbrowser Extensions doesn't fix the issue.
3) The TBE folks are supposedly not using the proper Javascript handler.

This is a pain, because TBE is an integral reason I use Firefox. The ability to use tabs as a browser metaphor is important, but TBE puts all the functionality into one easy to use extension.

What's worse is that Bloglines is the way I get information now. Period.

For now the workaround I have to use is inelegant, but it gets the job done. I am using the Bloglines Mobile section. It is a stripped down version, but it works for now.

I wonder what the final solution will be and what the true root cause is at this point? Is it Bloglines or TBE or Firefox?