I’ve been looking for a RSS reader for about two years now. I think I tried them all under both Windows and OS X. I liked JetBrains’ Omea Reader, FeedDemon, and PulpFiction, but I’ve come to the conclusion that stand-alone RSS readers are not the answer. I don’t like running lots of specialized applications. RSS, being a web-technology, needs to be integrated with the browser.

Bloglines and Pluck are web-based which is a step in the right direction. The downside is you are at their server’s whim and performance is generally shoddy. Plus web interfaces suck in general.

There’s a handful of Firefox extensions for RSS reading, Sage being the best of the lot. However, XUL (the technology they are written in) isn’t the most dynamic platform to develop software under. All of the extensions are missing key features such as auto-checking, mark all as read, and item counts.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what I want does not exist. In fact, I am not even sure of exactly what I want other than an easy to use, feature-rich, noninvasive RSS reader that’s somehow integrated with the browser. If I can think of what that means, perhaps I’ll write it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2005 at 7:52 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.