Opera Mail as default RSS feed reader in Win7?

paul1149

paul1149

I'm using the standalone Opera Mail application for feeds. In my browser, when I click on an RSS feed, OM is not an option because OM does not register itself as a feed reader on the Win7 system.

Is there any chance this will be corrected? Or is there a workaround?

Thanks,
Paul

burnout426

burnout426 Volunteer

You are correct that Opera mail doesn't associate itself with the feed protocol. But, even if it did, things still wouldn't work as Opera Mail doesn't support accepting feed URLs on the command line to automatically subscribe to a feed.

Also, in the "Local State" file (in the roaming profile folder if you're using Opera 25+ or the local profile folder if you're using Chrome), under the "excluded schemes" section, you might have to add the 'feed' protocol if it's not already there. Otherwise Opera/Chrome won't do anything with the feed URL.

Even then, when you visit a feed page in your browser, your browser has to turn that URL into a feed URL and navigate to it so your browser can pass it on to the local feed handler program. If your browser doesn't do that (Chrome and Opera 25 for example), you'll need an extension that does that.

If you use Firefox and Thunderbird, things are a lot better. Although, I've found that Thunderbird doesn't associate itself with the feed protocol correctly, which might cause problems with other browser besides Firefox.

Now, since Opera Mail is dead, there's no chance that this will be corrected. Opera Mail in Oepra 12.17 didn't support this either though. And, there's no workaround.

Now, if you're using Opera 25+, you can install the Smart RSS and RSS Detector extensions and forget about Opera Mail altogether (if you only use Opera Mail for feeds). Those extensions pretty much clone Opera Mail as far as feeds and feed reading goes. And, subscribing works fine that way since the extensions detect and process feeds.

paul1149

paul1149

Thanks again, burnout, for a very informative reply. I didn't know OM was dead, but I guess I'm not surprised. I'm on slimjet, another blink browser, and now I see there is a class of opera extensions that will not install on anything else. I currently have an feed subscription extension, but all its options are for online readers, with the exception of "default reader", which is why I wanted to register OM with Win7.

Maybe the answer is to use a browser-based feed reader. What's keeping me from dropping OM is that Google uses redirection to count clicks even internal to our emails, and I think that is over the line. Slimjet has a setting to stop that on google searches, but I don't think it applies to gmail.

The workaround does exist, but it's to manually copy and paste the feed url into OM, which isn't too onerous at the moment.

BW,
Paul