Some blog I enjoy are designed very beautifully. Currently, I can click the title to open the post in Safari, if I remember that it was a pretty site. I’d love to be able to view them inside NetNewsWire in a WebView instead, to keep the arrow-keys and space-key features for browsing between posts intact.
Additionally, it would be really neat to be able to set up which feeds display in the normal feed view, the one everything shows up in now, and which should load the website in a WebView.
I appreciate good design, and I’d love to enjoy the design of some of the blogs I read. I also dislike bad design, and I’m glad I don’t have to look at some of the websites with interesting posts but poor taste.
NetNewsWire for iOS has this feature, and NetNewsWire of Yore had this feature too.
But here’s the problem these days: on iOS your content, ads, and tracking blockers and other plugins work for these web views — but on Mac they do not.
And that makes this a privacy issue, and very much a surprising privacy issue because people wouldn’t suspect that these things wouldn’t run.
Given that, it’s hard in good conscience to add this feature. I know that some people would volunteer and say it’s okay for them, or it would be okay if they had the option to do it with certain sites, yes.
But I would have to put in a strong and scary warning next to this feature. And even then people would ignore it (people don’t always read) and then report bugs about misbehavior compared to Safari (about ads not being blocked, for instance).
And then some people would be upset enough to post on social media or forums or write blog posts about how NetNewsWire adds ads to web content (even though that wouldn’t be true).
So: I hear you, and I get why it would be cool and useful — but it’s a terrible can of awful worms!
Thank you for taking the time to explain the issue this thoroughly! The situation is unfortunate, but I completely agree with your conclusion. I’ll file some feedback with Apple, maybe macOS 28 can bring some of that system-wide content-blocking goodness to Mac.
Unrelated to NNW, but i believe the filtering/blocking in all apps is what Kaylee has been working on with Filtr. It’s in TestFlight but i haven’t tried it. A bit more info at Wipr + Filtr
Oh, that’s neat and might, eventually, allow an in-app browser in NNW! Once Liquid Glass has gotten better, probably with macOS 27, I’ll give that a go.