NewsMonster is evil

I was dinking around with RSS and Atom feeds from blogs the other day, and ran across some software called NewsMonster. It’s a news client for Mozilla/Firefox, and has gotten good reviews. However, when I installed it, it caused Mozilla to hang. I killed the mozilla.exe process and restarted, but no luck – always it hangs at the splash screen.

The NewsMonster website (http://www.newsmonster.org) was worthless. Their suggested way of reporting a problem with the software is to use a special menu item they install into the Mozilla help menu. Of course, if Mozilla no longer works, that’s not much help! So, I tried a second option, the IRC channel recommended for assistance. There were two other people there – one who was idle and AFK, and another who was just as clueless as me. So I IM’ed the author of the software twice, and he didn’t respond either time.

I finally found this description of how to manually uninstall NewsMonster – http://www.peerfear.org/nm-wiki/UninstallNewsMonster. But I did all the instructions exactly and Mozilla still wouldn’t start. So I had to completely uninstall Mozilla and re-install. What a pain in the ass! You can bet I won’t be trying NewsMonster again.

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