[marc]

FWIW it seems to me that most disagreement around OW's feed handling centres around the presentation of feeds as 'bookmark-lets' vs. 'formatted display' a la Safari.

One limited suggestion I've made, to bridge the gap would be utilising a mechanism like the Custom Stylesheet option in Site Preferences, to allow users to view feeds as bookmarks, or view the feed rendered by the browser.

Obviously the rough edges could be smoothed, much as Safari does by making the rendered RSS view a special mode with appropriate affordances, and simplifying the process of selecting feed view mode (e.g. "View as Bookmarks" or "View as News Feed" when subscribing, and as Site Pref option.)

The Site Preferences feature could still allow Custom Stylesheets, allowing control over rendered feed appearances one a Per-Site, and/or Collection basis (by adding support for Collections to the Site Prefs feature.)

A side request would be to redesign the Bookmark Info pane to maximise the space available to the Comment/Feed Content pane, and allow custom font sizes in the field, to improve the reading experience of the current implementation.

Supporting both view modes would enable the user to deal with differently focussed feeds, e.g. notification feeds, bookmark lists/synching (del.icio.us etc.) and full-content feeds.

Along with updates to Smart Collection capabilities (e.g. finer-grained feed-related properties) and the Bookmarks sidebar, these changes would make OW a very capable RSS reader indeed.

Of course, it might also help to support Growl. : )