What is Your Favorite RSS Reader?

Cyberhwk asks: "What is your favorite RSS reader? I've been trying to find a nice RSS reader. I am most intrested in an rss reader that can be run on OS X but I'm also intrested in Linux and Windows XP as well. I'm mostly interested in freeware because I'm currently going to college and I can't afford anything at the moment. So what do you use for an RSS reader? What does it run on? Most importantly is it free?"

Comments

Safari as an RSS reader

[Kethinov]

Safari will have RSS reading built into it with MacOS 10.4. There's your Mac solution. =P

Re:Safari as an RSS reader

[SimplexO]

Firefox will have RSS reading built into it by 1.0. There's your Mac/Linux/Windows solution. =P

They call it livemarks and it autmatically picks up on sites that offer feeds. You can add a livemark by clicking on a button on an RSS/Atom Enabled website. It feels just like a folder of bookmarks (where each bookmark is an entry).

Safari 2.0

[Dylbert]

Don't forget, next year when OSEX X.IV comes out, it will come with Safari 2.0, which includes an RSS reader.

Otherwise, there are plenty of projects on Sauceforge and Virgintracker. Go try some of them out.

Net News Wire

[phUnBalanced]

I've heard good things about Net News Wire. I believe there's a "Lite" free version.

Not affiliated.

Straw

[Christ-on-a-bike]

Straw is a very nice app for Linux (Gnome): website here... be careful about the dependencies when compiling it.

FireFox Nightly

[Professor Cool Linux]

I use Livemarks. Everyone not using FF Nightlys will see in 1.0. It makes an rss into a folder in your bookmarks...

"RSS feed integration into Firefox... specifically:

- when a page is encountered that has the
link tag in the display an icon in the status bar that opens an Add
Bookmark dialog to add the feed as a bookmark.
- RSS Feed bookmarks behave like folders in that they can be opened, showing the
posts as bookmarks underneath. They should be immutable folders however (cannot
cut, delete from them, cannot insert into them, drag operations blocked).
- the major RSS formats should be supported (1.0 RDF, 2.0 XML etc)

A suggested approach is to decorate such bookmarks with a flag, e.g.
LIVE_BOOKMARK="true" and when the bookmarks datasource is asked for children of
that container, it can see that it's a live bookmark and fetch the content.
Caching of results can be implemented if there are update problems.

As a side note Live Bookmarks are the perfect use case of Scheduled Update
Notifications... they are files that change often and there's a real value in
having the icon change subtly or something similar when there's a new post. This
should not be seen as a pre-requisite for the former however.

I'm not likely to get to this for 1.0 so I'm looking for help to implement...
this would be a great project for someone to get their feet wet in RDF/Bookmarks
code." -- Ben Goodger

Source: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=244078 #c1

a web based service

[Masa]

Bloglines

It's a great reader. And always with me there, where I have an Internet connection.

Re:a web based service

[Indomitus]

One of the big benefits of Bloglines is that since it's all off of one site, they only hit each site's feed once for everyone to read it. A lot of people have their individual readers setup to hit sites every few minutes which can lead to a lot of bandwidth wasted when you multiply that times hundreds or thousands of RSS readers. With one site doing the hitting, everybody reads the feed and the site doesn't have to worry about RSS readers killing their bandwidth every 5 minutes.

liferea is nice... and forumzilla... and opera

[displague]

Liferea has a clean gnome2 interface and supports atom.. I like it.

I also use Forumzilla from Thunderbird. Opera supports rss directly in its mail client.

Yahoo

[stu72]

I don't have a huge amount of experience w/RSS but I'd like to point out that you can now include RSS feeds in your "My Yahoo" page, along with the plethora of news/weather/stock quotes/etc that you set up - it works for me.

http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/promo_content?.module =ycontent

Mozilla Firefox & Sage Extension

[duffbeer703]

Both work really well for me!

Bloglines

[sitcoman]

Bloglines.com is a great RSS aggregation service, which handles as many RSS feed as you want, lets you sort and search them, and makes it really easy (compared to others) to add any feed you find on the Net. It's free and of course it's available on any OS. It also means that you never miss an update when you're away from your home PC.

And as a cherry on top, they have apps for all 3 major OS's that work with the website to notify you of updates when you're not using your browser. I don't personally use these helper apps though, so I can't vouch for them.

In summation: you should check it out, it's great!

Re:Bloglines

[Gudlyf]

I second that. Another amazing feature Bloglines has is email feeds. This allows you to have emails (say, newsletters or mailing lists) sent to a special address that bloglines assigns you (username21345@bloglines.com). You can't reply to those emails with Bloglines, so it's really just to receive email.

Bloglines really is a fantastic service. I just hope they stick around, as all of this is free and I have to imagine it costs money to run it.

Slashdock!

[millia]

No, that's no typo. Slashdock is a dock-based RSS grabber. Works pretty darn good, author is helpful, and is very unobtrusive (or obtrusive, if you want it to be.) Used in conjunction with Camino, it makes for highly efficient browsing.
Highly recommended.

RSS Bandit

[prostoalex]

RSS Bandit is good, I switched to it from SharpReader some time ago and never went back.

Check out Sage or Sharpreader

[nocent]

Sage is an RSS reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. It doesn't aggregate and combine multiple feeds but it works well within Firefox.

For Windows XP, Sharpreader is a good free aggregator. It can get slow if you have hundreds of feeds.

On my Palm: JPluck

[Jon_Aquino]

JPluck's great for scraping websites and RSS/Atom feeds onto a Palm on a scheduled basis.

Opera

[NaDrew]

The Opera browser now includes an RSS reader integrated with the M2 mail client.

Subscribing to newsfeeds with Opera Mail is extremely simple, as most newsfeeds will automatically be subscribed when you click their links on a Web page. The feed will show up under "Newsfeeds" at the bottom of your "Mail" panel. Newsfeed items are presented and handled in the same manner as e-mail messages and Usenet news articles. This makes it easy to forward a newsfeed item by e-mail to a friend, access stored items using the search and "Quick find features", label particular items for later follow-up, and so forth.

No need for a separate app. To subscribe to "Ask Slashdot", for example, just click this link (copied from the bottom of this page) and Opera's RSS reader will auto-discover the feed and add it to your list.

Bloglines

[xyrw]

Bloglines has a web-based interface, but makes sense if you will be using several different computers at different times. Unless RSS feeds develop an IMAP-like protocol, I will not be willing to download all my 100+ subscriptions once for every computer I use.

You may not appreciate using a web interface, but give it a try. In short, the benefits are:

• Automatically synchronized subscription list
• Consistent interface on all platforms
• Availability on any platform with a web browser
• Easy keyword searching for new feeds
• Free (beer)
• Read the news just once
• OPML import and export

Balanced against

• Web interface is relatively slow, but you can download a platform-native notifier (available for Windows, Mac OS X, Konfabulator, KDE, Mozilla/Firefox, and Web)
• Not Free (speech)

Bloglines recently introduced a few new features, such as the ability to publish your own blog with them, but I think Wordpress or Typepad is better suited to that. No harm checking out their About page, anyway.

Re:RSS Reader for cellphone

[steve.m]

I've written one. Have a look here

Feed Demon

[rangerx]

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp

rss and atom support.
newspaper view (although I hate this mode)
opml supoprt
performs decently with badly formatted feeds
small and fast

aKregator

[jmontano]

Runs on Kde its pretty fast and customizable
Akregator

NewsMac

[Naum]

NewsMac

For Mac OS X.

Free. Though please send a donation in support if you like it.

nntp/rss converts RSS feeds into newgroups.

[kohler]

I like nntprss , which acts like a RSS to NNTP (news) gateway. You can use your favorite newsreader (I use Mozilla) to read RSS feeds. And it's written in Java so it's cross-platform.