What's the Best RSS Reader Not Named Google Reader? 287
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The news that that Google is killing off Google Reader in their annual spring cleaning means hordes of abandoned RSS users will need a new home to get their news fix before July 1, 2013. Sure, Google Reader may not have been the most beautifully designed product to come out of Mountain View, Calif., but it sure was convenient. And now that it's going away, it's evident just how valuable it has been. 'It's a tough question that's not unlike asking what's the best planet to live on not named Earth or the best thing to breathe not named air,' writes Casey Chan. 'Google Reader was that obvious a choice.' So what's the best RSS reader not named Google Reader? Is it Reeder? Or NetNewsWire? Maybe Feedly? Or should we all just ditch RSS and get with Twitter?"
Personally, I've taken a liking to Akregator on my desktop and Sparse RSS on my phone (syncing done woefully manually by exporting the list of feeds from my desktop reader and importing into the phone reader now and then). Update: 03/14 14:43 GMT by T : Depending on your aesthetics and platform of choice, you might like one of these four options, too.
Feedly looks ok (Score:2)
Feedly looks OK so far, http://theoldreader.com/ [theoldreader.com] maybe?
Twitter is no replacement!
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Netvibes (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Netvibes for several years now, and am mostly pleased, partly due to its "widget" mode, which lets me separate posts by feed rather than seeing them piled up by time. It will aggregate facebook, twitter, email (subject lines only), and has various widgets for just about anything: google news searches, ebay bids/sales, stock tracking, etc.
It's mobile interface, however, has some serious flaws: it reports the wrong feed name when you select a post (I think it's showing the one you previously selected), and some feeds don't display at all (TechCrunch and MAKE, I'm looking at you) -- it might just be a matter of selecting a different version of the feed, though.
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Now that I've been trying Netvibes for a few hours, a few things are bothering me:
- Do I really need to confirm every time I want to mark all items as read?
- Why can't it put all the "new" items at the top? Sure, it was posted yesterday, but you didn't find it until right now. Why display it after all those other articles I've already read? Google Reader sorted by the time it found the new articles, putting new stuff at the top above all the stuff I already marked as read.
- Why so slow to update feeds
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I'm impressed by ustart.org. The interface is definitely fast. I wish they supported keyboard shortcuts though.
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Re:Netvibes (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd pay a lot more than $36/year for Google Reader. Pretty much hating all of the alternatives though. Really, is it so fucking hard to have a list of feeds on one side and a list of article headlines that expand to show the full text when clicked on the other?
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I've been playing with settings in Feedly to make it more Reader-like. There are a few problems though. First, I don't see a way to hide the number of Facebook or Google+ likes. I don't care how many people like it, only whether I do or not. Second, the Android app does not have a simplified list view; it's limiting the number of stories I can see on my phone by including a thumbnail pic that makes entries too high.
News reader makers - If you are reading the /. coverage with interest, I highly encourage you
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Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:5, Insightful)
I use RSS feeds mainly for research journals to watch for relevant papers as they come out. And... er... webcomics. Why the hell would I care to include my friends on either one of those? My friends are idiots. If I find a particular journal article relevant to them (or funny webcomic), I can post it to one of those various services.
Why does it seem like every RSS reader out there is trying to get me to merge it with facebook?
Step 1: Make a website that does something
Step 2: Integrate social media
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT!!!
I try to avoid companies that seem to have that plan.
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Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:5, Interesting)
1) New Gmail account
2) Fake Facebook account
3) Fake Twitter account
4) Use these for every sign-in thing on all the stupid websites that have a boner for social media.
These accounts will never have friends. They won't have any followers to spam. "Will you allow us to post to your feed?" 'Sure. Even I will never ever see it.' I'm happily experimenting with a couple news readers now despite their asinine requirement that I sign in or otherwise attach one of the above.
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I tried Feedly on iOS a couple weeks ago. It was a mess; I couldn't ever get it to display more than one article. It also seems to be too focused on looking pretty.
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I now realise that feedly requires a browser plugin to work. This doesn't work for so many people who can;t install plugins on work machines, public access machines, etc.
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yep
been using feedly for at least a year. i've used flipboard a little as well and they will probably work on their own RSS subscription service now
the geeks probably hate feedly because it looks pretty, but i hated using google reader's GUI.
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I just installed Slick RSS for Chrome and so far it looks pretty nice. It does not rely on any outside services to function.
Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:5, Insightful)
I need something that is cross machine compatible, linking my read/unread to a single machine isn't fun
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I understand. It'd be nice to have something else that's consistent between OSX and Android, in my case.
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Feedly just sent out an alert today that they launched some new program that replaces Google Reader with syncing (I can't remember the name of it now). I just started using them recently.
Q: What's theName of the Best Reader? (Score:2)
A: Aaron Schwartz
Seriously, Google should release all sources under a BSD-derived license, with a memorial dedication to Aaron, in place of the UC Regent's notice.
Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:4)
There are ways to make it look like GoogleReader I think. In the top right gear / settings, I tried "Timeline View" which gives you a blurb and image. Decent shortcuts as well.
Re:Feedly looks ok (Score:4, Informative)
I tried Feedly for a few minutes, but it felt like it was trying to prioritize and reorganize my news stories automatically for me and the design was awful for simply reading stuff. And it required simply too many clicks to read slashdot since I had to expand the whole summary for each item myself and even mark items as read manually. Not going back.
I'm giving Feedly a try starting today, and I think you probably have the same reaction I did: It's NOT EXACTLY THE SAME AS GREADER. But it's learnable, and it's customizable.
Keyboard shortcuts exist, but they're all different than GReader, and that takes some getting used to.
If you like GReader's compact title-only view, that's an option -- but you can also show everything by default, which is preferable if you have a folder of comics feeds like I do.
I think Feedly has two big points in its favor, though: it can sync ONCE to GReader to download your feeds (including what articles you've already read), and it's cross-browser and cross-platform with its own mobile apps. (Plus it's ad-supported, which means they have a revenue stream to keep them going in the future.)
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Everything you just complained about can be changed in the preferences.
http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/tips-for-google-reader-users-migrating-to-feedly/ might be of interest for you.
Guess how the team found out (Score:4, Informative)
"There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products,” Alan Green an engineer at Google said.
The RSS team got the axe via Google Reader, which suddenly became their least favorite app.
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Grrrrr.... I am SO TIRED of all the apps I use integrating with Google products that later get canceled. I was using NetNewsWire on my iPhone until the new version practically forced me to sync with Google Reader. I resisted for a long time, but I really liked that app so I grudgingly setup a google account and sync'd with google reader to make the app happy and work right again. Now they're pulling the plug. *Sigh*
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NewsBlur (Score:4)
In my case it's newsblur.com
Only problem is that it's still a rather small operation and right now the unexpected flood of new users is wreaking havoc on its servers.
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Exactly. That's barely the price of some smartphone game.
Funny thing is, I would've gladly paid Google five bucks per month for the comfort Reader's interface offered.
Feedly isn't perfect but it works everywhere (Score:2)
Re:Feedly isn't perfect but it works everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, why DOES Feedly need an extension to work? I can see where an extension might make it more *useful*, but the basic functionality doesn't need it.
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Keeping feeds separate (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I use RSS feeds differently than other people; but I've had trouble finding a decent reader that allows you to look at your feeds separately (on my iPad anyway - Firefox and Safari do fine if I'm on my desktop). Apparently most people like all the data all mixed in together, but I am generally reading RSS to find more targeted info - new Netflix streamable movies, for example.
Re:Keeping feeds separate (Score:5, Funny)
In Google Reader you can do that, you just click on the feed you want to view in the "Subscriptions" list on the left instead of "All items" which mixes them all together.
But it's fun to mix the satire news with the real news and guess which is which.
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on computers (not phone AFAIK), RSSOwl does this (and is best to me) on all platforms, open source; on macs only you also have Vienna. Both scale really well (like, 100+ feed sources, 10000+ unread instantly handled), both can sort, search, display html site inline, lock feed items...
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For what its worth, I have been using Fever for a few years now and think it is hands down the best reader on the market (wish the mobile version were better though)
Tiny Tiny RSS (Score:5, Interesting)
Run your own google reader:
tt-rss.org [nyud.net]
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This indeed, tt-rss is pretty nice!
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Re:Tiny Tiny RSS (Score:4, Interesting)
This really is superb. Has a really nice Android client as well as the web interface.
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This looks to be the closest replacement of Google Reader I have found. I'm still investigating mobile multi-user support. That is a showstopper for me. If this does workout, I may even be better than Google Reader. This way I control the data and not Google.
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Worth bearing in mind that it's likely there'll be an influx of contributions to this and other open source alternatives from the Reader exodus. So even if tt-rss doesn't have some feature you need right now...chances are high it'll mysteriously show in the next few weeks =)
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There's also gritttt-rss (http://gritttt-rss.nicolashoening.de/) which extends tt-rss with some sharing and import features. I haven't tried installing either yet.
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Just gave it a shot. Polished web interface, nails the key features from what I can see, and seems rather nice overall, but it's frustratingly slow and painfully unresponsive on the shared host I'd be using. If you have a dedicated host, then this definitely seems like something that's worth using, or at least worth looking into. As for me, I'll be looking for something else, since I don't want to be staring at "Loading..." for 15 seconds every time I click on one of my feeds.
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Do you have a PHP accelerator in line? (Can you do that on shared hosts? I don't know, never used one). Most PHP webapps are basically unusable in practice without an accelerator, inc. tt-rss.
Firefox Live Bookmarks (Score:2)
It's a much different flow from Google Reader (and every other RSS reader I've ever seen, actually), but I use Firefox Live Bookmarks exclusively.
I've tried switching away numerous times. Particularly during the entire Firefox 3.x series, which had a major bug where refreshing Live Bookmarks caused the whole browser to stop responding until it finished. With the 100+ blogs and webcomics I read, that meant every hour or so, it would freeze up for 2-3 minutes. I switched to Chrome for literally everything els
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I used to use Live Bookmarks but they are simply too cumbersome and inconvenient. You have to check every feed separately, manually for updates. That is barely a step up from manually checking the websites you got the feeds from!
With an RSS feed reader, you can see all unread messages at once and just page through them. So if I have 100 feeds and only 5 of them have new items, I am just looking at 5 new items in a single list. It's stupidly convenient. Plus simple features like being able to "star" ite
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Liferea (Score:2)
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+1 for liferea
I have used it for years. I like that it grabs all the headlines in the morning, then i can read them on the train (or where ever else I might be without a net connection). I can flag the interesting ones and read them later when i am online
over the past couple of years the way its hard some odd bugs in it counting and displaying of unread or flagged mails, but it seems mostly good now in 1.8.12
Miss RSS in Apple Mail (Score:2)
Why this trend away from RSS I wonder? It is because Google wants you to use G+ as the reader for all your "feeds" in some Facebook-wannabe fashion?
It was called RSS Reader (Score:3)
Have your own server? Tiny Tiny RSS (Score:4, Informative)
1kpl.us (Score:3)
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Looks great, but I can't find a way to make it display just the titles of items and have them expand by clicking on them. My Google Reader looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/M8Td2mU.png
It's much easier to go through a lot of items like that.
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None of those seem to filt the bill... (Score:2)
So I see two sorts of things being mentioned:
-Desktop/Phone applications that have no idea what you have read/not read on other devices
-Hosted RSS readers that do not have that problem, but could just as easily be shut down at the whim of the operator.
What about self-hosted alternatives internet accessible? Install something on my own http server and go to town (e.g. like roundcube or squirrelmail for email). RSS reading is sufficiently low load that even most home internet connections suffice to serve it
Well, DomDocument, obviously. (Score:2)
If I can't code against it, it's not good enough.
Upgrade your domain to Google Apps Business today! (Score:3, Insightful)
Google has quite some balls sending me an email today asking me to upgrade my personal Google Apps account to their business tier today. Only $5/month!
You know what I would pay for? Google Reader.
(For the record, the reason I don't upgrade is because I'm a single user of the domain, but have 3 accounts - one personal, one for root, and one for a separate alerts mailbox...labels don't suffice yet).
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For $5 a month you could rent a VPS and run Owncloud on it.
How about one I can install on my webserver? (Score:2)
Since we're on the topic, does anyone know a good RSS reader that I can install on my own web server?
I currently use Gregarius [sourceforge.net] but the project is no longer under development.
I don't want a desktop based one as I need to ensure it checks the feeds whether my computer is on or not. Also, there's nothing more convenient than simply clicking links within a browser.
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Sux0r (sorry not having seen you earlier, I just announced it 1 km below)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sux0r/ [sourceforge.net]
plenty of interesting features including bayesian filtering of lots of posts...
If you try it do tell me!
H.
If applicable: host it yourself (Score:4, Informative)
Self-hosting solutions are available, will never get canned in this manner, and are highly customizable. But, of course, require a place to host it.
I've tried both Tiny Tiny RSS [tt-rss.org] and RSSLounge [aditu.de] before in an attempt to rid myself of the Google Reader addiction, but found them both lacking in some respects every time. Since Google Reader is disappearing though, I made a new attempt this morning.
RSSLounge seems to have been abandoned a year or two ago, but perhaps it was stable enough (RSS aggregation is not nuclear science).
Tiny Tiny RSS have some in my eyes quite horrible default settings, especially coming from Google Reader. The good news, however, is that it is configurable to mimic Google Reader quite closely. With some work with custom CSS rules it is quite close at a first glance.
My Tiny Tiny RSS configuration:
Last time I installed it on Debian I ran into enough caveats that it led me to write a guide for others to install it, but since then it has been included in the unstable repository. To install it, some manual work was still needed, though:
Then go to http://localhost/tt-rss and start configuring. All subscriptions can be exported from Google Reader and imported in Tiny Tiny RSS, keeping dirctory structure intact.
I'll try to migrate fully to this solution now that Google apparently no longer wants my traffic :-) . I'd say I probably use Reader the most of all Google's services, including Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc., so the decision to can it is quite strange from my personal view.
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Ah, I found out what happened to RSSLounge: it was superseded by the author's new project Selfoss [aditu.de]. Probably also an alternative to check out, though a lot of project communication seem to be in German, which might be a problem for some :-) .
BeyondPod (Score:2)
BeyondPod is my RSS client of choce. It is for mobile platforms (Windows and Android), and has a ton of features (including an in-built media player for podcasts, scheduling capabilities, etc.).
Firefox (Score:2)
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I used Thunderbird's inbuilt reader and I'm very happy with it to be honest.
Outlook (Score:4, Interesting)
Sage(s) (Score:2)
Long, long ago, I started using Sage with Firefox. When it was sort-of abandoned, I moved to Sage-Too.
Then, the main developer of Sage-Too went on a rant about not liking ad blockers, and left. Problem is, I like ad blockers and hate people who force me not to use them. The Sage project resumed working, but it didn't work with Ad Block. I managed to keep using Sage Too until I couldn't avoid upgrading from Firefox 3.6x. At that point, I cobbled together something with PHP on my local Apache server, plu
Multiple devices ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am ready to switch to anything else, as long as I can keep on reading stuff from everywhere. I am ready to install client applications.
Any idea ?
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Do Not Want Desktop Reader (Score:2)
Android app with alt text support (Score:2)
SelfOSS (Score:3)
I wanted a web-based reader, and did some searching last night.
I decided I wanted to go with a self-hosted option, and found SelfOSS. It's light-weight, PHP5 and the code is very clean. It can use MySQL or SQLite.
It's a single-person reader, with one username/password supported.
http://selfoss.aditu.de/ [aditu.de]
You can see a live demo here: http://stuporglue.org/selfoss/ [stuporglue.org]
The only downside so far is that with SQLite, the database locks when updates are running. This is fairly quick, but might be an issue for some people.
Here's what I'd like to see (Score:2)
That's it.
Pull the RSS feeds once an hour. Use HTML5 to store the data. Use Javascript to write the HTML. It doesn;t have to be fancy.
Bonus if I can 'install' my own CSS.
I'll save it on Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega.co.nz or even my own local storage.
I haven't kept up my skills, so that's me out. It's a weekend's work for someone...
Help a nerd out?
What we really need (Score:2)
isn't a new RSS reader but a new RSS syncing standard. Google Reader let people use several different viewers and they would all stay in sync: what was marked read here was marked read over there too. (OPML lets you import and export a list of subscriptions, but not a list of read items.) Clearly, relying on a single company to provide that service was a mistake. Can we come up with an open-source standard system that won't go poof at the whim of a single website, so that people can use multiple reading
what's the rush? (Score:2)
are we really so bored we must find the replacement OMG SKY IS FALLING on the very next day?
chances are that two months from now you'll have better auto migration tools and the people recommending you a replacement have then actually used the replacements for more than a day.
personally I don't find the need for a rss reader to be that big. niche blogs tend to be best read at many articles at a time and and major stuff hits sites like slashdot at least twice so.. if the actual site is too fucking crappy to r
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personally I don't find the need for a rss reader to be that big.
For people working in particular tech branches, RSS feeds are the simplest and fastest way to keep themselves up-to-date. Most web sites and news wires allow subscribing to a feed of articles with a tag. Often hard to find, occasionally manual editing of the URI is required - but works like a charm in the end. Sparing you the need to fish for those few articles.
and personally I've had the opinion as well that if you trench yourself into reading news just from your feeds you'll end up getting just a small slice.
That is very true. And sadly if I for example have 5 subscriptions related to a certain topic, the recommendation by most of the on-line RSS readers
Bloglines (Score:2)
Opera (Score:2)
I actually love Opera's feeder. Clean, simple, not beholden to web services like Google. Of course, this comes with its own set of problems:
1) Requires installing another browser and a proprietary one at that
2) Opera's mail client is utter shit (hence the reason I use Thunderbird for my E-mail or I'd just use Opera and have a one-stop.
3) Opera tends to have good releases then buggy ones. Stick to the odd point releases.(12.11, 12.13, etc. 12.14 has issues with certain pages hanging again).
Sage for Firefox (Score:2)
Thunderbird (Score:2)
I just want a simple, fast RSS reader. I'm not looking for many features.
I tried a few dedicated products, but Thunderbird 2.x works best for me (I didn't try a later version). It's got a 3-pane interface, it's lightening fast (essential for browsing hundreds or thousands of headlines), you can turn off remote images for more speed and privacy (use View > Message Body As > Simple HTML), and you can navigate (mostly) by keyboard (the amazing Nostalgy extension may help here; I've used it for so long th
I don't know about the best (Score:2)
But certainly the least *fussiest* for me has been Feedly. Install extension, sign-in with google, bam, done.
(tip: do full article view and it's as close to gr as you can.)
All the others, oldreader, newsblur, netvibes have been bitching one way or another.
host your own! Sux0r, plus bayesian filtering! (Score:2)
If you own or share your webhosting, what about setting the agregator just there, so you can access it from just any platform you want?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sux0r/ [sourceforge.net]
You can even train it, bayesian like, to sort your very own interesting posts...
Need a solution for Lynx, believe it or not. (Score:3)
I have a confession to make. I'm forbidden from surfing the web at work, so I SSH into my own BSD shell account and browse using Lynx. Yes, Lynx, the text-only web browser. It's surprisingly functional on a lot of websites, and for some bizarre reason Google Reader has a page optimized for Lynx. 80-90% of my RSS reading is through a text-only browser.
I don't see any other services meeting that need. Feedly, or any other 'app', is a non-starter. All the services I've tried so far do not work under Lynx. I think it's the end of text-only web browsing for me -- for the entire world, in fact. That's a shame; text-only browsing is much faster, and with the ability to pipe web pages to Linux commands there's a lot of power there as well.
I feel that a subtle and powerful knowledge is passing from this world.
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Assuming the same content is available via twitter or facebook, it's a lot easier to miss critical information there with a constant stream. In reader I know how many updates each blog, comic or whatever has had and can easily keep up at my leisure. Instead of intermixed with all my friends on whatever social interface.
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The only way you can be sure that software will be around forever is if you have the source and are able to compile it yourself.
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And even that assumes you have a working compiler for your machine.
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Yep I'd like to filter off CNN's "fast facts" and "N things you should know about" articles, and news about certain celebrities.
Actually now that I think of it, almost all the crap I'd like to filter comes in on the CNN feed...
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Anyone who can use bookmarks and Google has no need for an RSS reader. RSS as a whole is just a solution to a problem that never existed in the first place.
But how do you know the site updated its contents in the first place? Would you manually go to 24 sites (the number of RSS feeds I currently have) just to find out if any of them have updated their contents? Also, don't diss on snippets. Why do papers have abstracts/summaries when I can read the whole thing I am interested in? A snippet is somewhere between a sensational headline and a long text that (should) give me a good 10 second idea on whether I want to read the whole article. If you have feeds that
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That's a feature, not a bug..
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most people on planet earth have never heard of RSS and don't use it. sad but tru.
That goes against all evidence presented by the fact that RSS readers are constantly on the top downloaded apps in Apple's App Store.
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RSS is the button at the top of Firefox, it shows when the page has an rss fee, you click it, it subscribes and the entry in the bookmark menu looks like title menu with a popout list of articles.... I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I can't imagine visiting a special site for it, when my RSS feeds are right there on the bookmarks menu.
Can someone explain what the real problem is here??
Different strokes.
I use the Firefox RSS too and love it. On my desktop. On my mobile devices, I prefer Pulse, though. Even though their latest UI "improvement" for selecting sets of feeds is really annoying, I love the way I can see all those headlines and thumbnails at a glance.
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Two main advantages Google Reader had over Firefox RSS bookmarks:
Firefox RSS bookmarks provide a workable RSS solution, but it was just much ea
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I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I have 100+ RSS feeds. What you're describing doesn't sound like it scales at all. I'm not going through 100+ bookmarks to see what's new, I want an RSS reader to display new items.