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Somewhat beside the point, but I don't understand how people are not terrified of browser extensions. I have decided to trust two and hoping to get rid of one of them eventually.

I'm not about to get a browser extension for an RSS reader.




I run Fraidycat in a separate Firefox profile which I don't use for anything else. If I want to hang onto a link from a feed, I'll just open it again in my main profile. I've found a side benefit in that the slight extra friction of opening a window for a new profile results in less frequent checking for feed updates, which seems like a good thing for me.

I also have my Fraidycat profile set up with the Temporary Containers extension, so that every link I open from my feeds automatically opens into an ephemeral container and nothing is shared. Doesn't protect against Fraidycat itself, but does keep things of only passing interest nicely hived off from everything else.


I use two browsers: Plain Firefox with minimal extensions (Bitwarden, Firefox Containers) and then a Firefox Developer edition for all the rest.

The primary is for anything company or client related stuff. It is where I debug client websites (at least if I need to log in), check mail etc.

The other one is for research.

Last time I know I was hit by malware was on a locked down company laptop >10 so years ago, a drive by exploit from a banner ad on a blog.

Conclusion might surprise some of you: I'm still scared! (Which might be the reason why this actually works for me.)


The traditional model of application installation gives the application total control over your user account, including your browser.

Installing an RSS reader as a separate program would in fact be more dangerous than one as an extension.


I was thinking of the alternative being a website like google reader. Yes, you give up control of the data about your reading habits, but you know the scope of what you give up.

For what it's worth, I agree that the traditional model gives up all control. I'm not a fan of that either, and I go to some lengths to isolate processes from each other. I certainly wish we had saner desktop OSes.




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