Use Firefox As an RSS Reader With NewsFox
Many people use Firefox to read their RSS feeds although many seasoned RSS users have a standalone RSS reader of choice. There are several more advanced RSS add-ons for Firefox besides the standard Live Bookmark feature. Some of them being developed for years now. Time to round them up and see what they have to offer.
Wizz definitely deserves the title of a “full-featured RSS reader”. This is available in two modes. It can either sit in your sidebar or freely roam your desktop as a separate window. The same basic organization exists in both the versions. Those are vertical space divided into three parts: the list of feeds, followed by the list of feed items below. Finally, the actual content of an individual feed.
A lot of thought has been put into the product, and details, such as the ability to middle tap an item, it doesn’t end at that. Have it open in a new window, or feeds opening but not being marked as reading on mouseover clearly show this.
The ability to import/export to OPML is also there. Integration with live bookmarks as well as the ability to search/save RSS feeds and create watch lists. Even the weather is included.
So, while the features are obviously there. Is there anything bad about Wizz? The display of the feeds in that small window isn’t too great. Especially if you don’t have a big screen resolution. Nevertheless, the standalone window mode pretty much remedies that. We’d also like to see more way to list feed items. Because tapping on directories and subdirectories can be tiresome if you have a lot of feeds. Wizz is definitely a mature product and you should give it a try if you’re serious about your RSS reading besides this.
You can use RSS Ticker for a quick overview of what’s new without actually having to open the feeds themselves. The ticker is either placed at the bottom or top of the screen. It has a huge number of options. You can control the scroll smoothness and speed. You can hide it when empty. You can set it to work only for certain feeds. RSS ticker will definitely do the trick if the sheer idea of scrolling feeds appeals to you.
Sage is definitely one of the better known RSS Firefox plugins out there and is a fierce competitor to Wizz is the another heavyweight among Firefox plugins. Similar to Wizz, it’s also sidebar-based, but there is a big difference. Sage shows you the feeds in the actual Firefox window. The feel and look are customizable via CSS. We can’t say that one way is better than the other. It’s definitely based on personal preference. We suggest you try them both out and see which style fits you better.
Even though, Sage has some important options such as OPML import/export and advanced sorting of feeds. It’s definitely not even near Wizz’s complexity. On concord, some users will appreciate the lack of clutter and the leaner learning curve of Sage.
Beatnik
Beatnik is advertised as an elegant RSS reader and simple too. In fact, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that this is the truth. Nevertheless, we were unpleasantly surprised to find out that there are no options whatsoever. It’s just a nice way to check out your live bookmarks that are shown in the sidebar. That is while the actual articles are shown in the main Firefox window. We are guessing that Beatnik is in its early stage and that more options are on the way. On concord, as it is, we can recommend it only to users who want simplicity and zero options.
Although not an RSS feeder in the traditional sense. BlogRovr is a newcomer with big ambitions. This offers you items related to what you’re currently reading, based on a feed list you give it, instead of bringing you all the feeds at the same time. If you are familiar with Megite, Mashtracker or Techmeme and their clusters of related items. Think of BlogRovr as the same thing and then go.
BlogRovr displays items in a customizable window inside your browser that can be easily hidden if need be. This shows summaries of the post: tap on them, and you get the full article. BlogRovr also offers Twitter integration, which means you can instantly tell your friends what you’re currently browsing recently.
If you are used to Thunderbird and the way items are displayed there. You are going to love NewsFox. This is based on a very similar three-pane interface with the list of RSS channels being in the sidebar. The list of feeds in the upper pane and the actual item in the lower pane. It takes all of your screen estate such as Sage. Manually, you can add feeds, but it also supports Live Bookmarks from which you can enable or disable individual feeds.
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You can set the interval in which feeds are very important and updated by refreshing all feeds on startups as far as options go. You can override these settings for individual feeds even better. OPML Import/Export is also supported. Finally, we have noticed an interesting option not often seen in RSS readers, NewsFox can categorize individual items within a feed based on tags.
We also had some minor problems with NewsFox. The feeds just wouldn’t update, and we couldn’t get some feeds to work sometimes. At least not without a Firefox restart. NewsFox would be a great RSS reader for people who like the three-pane approach if these problems were ironed out.
Try InfoRSS if RSS Ticker doesn’t have enough options for you. Absolutely everything is customizable about this ticker. The entire list of options is far too long to be listed here. You can pause or stop the ticker. Mark all items as read with a single tap, or manage your feed subscriptions directly from the tiny toolbar. On concord, all that will seem such as nothing after you go into its options. What’s probably heaven for power users will surely be overwhelming for those of more casual variety.
The huge number of features carries the burden of easily missed bugs, unfortunately. We have encountered a particularly nasty one. In which our Firefox window got stretched far beyond the screen limits. This is ended up OK but heed the warning. You might want to choose something simpler if you are not prepared to tinker with InfoRSS to make it work perfectly.
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