By now, you have probably already seen tons of Firefox 4 reviews, previews and whatnot. Firefox 4 will officially be released tomorrow and will be available here, but if you’re impatient, you can get it here. You can also get it off Mozilla’s FTP server, but they politely request you don’t do that since the hordes of Firefox users leeching off those servers will kill them. At the moment, the Release Candidate version is still up on the Mozilla website.

Anyway, here’s an early review of the shiny new browser’s main features!

Main Window

That was the main window of Firefox 4. A radical change! You can say it looks like Google Chrome and you won’t be wrong. You can see the comparison below:

One of the more noticeable changes is the orange Firefox menu that replaces all the other drop-down menus, such as File, Edit etc… They have all been merged and stuffed under that one menu.

Update: Carrotmadman6 points out in the comments that you can access the traditional File, Edit, View, etc… menus by pressing ALT. They have been… shrunk!

Now, when I installed Firefox 4, almost all of my addons were not compatible with it yet. I cannot tell you where all the addons will now add their menu options as submenus, possibly under the Main Menu, like “Web Developer” did. That remains to be confirmed though.

Buttons have been combined: Reload and Stop have merged and placed inside the address bar area, as you see above. Not a bad thing. This shows Firefox 4 wants to have a minimalistic user interface.

Opening many tabs has some usability issues as you can see. I prefer multi-row tab bars but Firefox 4 wants to keep clutter at a minimum so it took the scrollable-tab-bar approach. Addons will probably fix that when they become compatible again.

Firefox now includes “Paste and Go” as a menu item! Excellent!

Firefox 4 now allows you to pin your favourite sites on the tab bar as App Tabs: they will lose their title and keep the favicon, essentially becoming a button. Think of it as a sort of speed-dial to access your favourite apps online such as Gmail or bookmarks such as Twitter.

One of the more interesting features of Firefox 4 is Tab Group which presents your tab in thumbnail format for easy grouping and organizing. Users who keep lots of tabs open will love this feature, allowing them to easily find tabs. For example, you can have a tab group: “Productivity” which will load your email, documents and calendars while another “Fun” group loads Youtube, Farmville and whatever sites you want, all while making switching easy.

Clicking on the Tab Groups option in the menu or using Ctrl+Shift+E will lead you to the Tab Group window where you can see your various groups and the tabs they contain.

To create a new group, click and drag over an empty space. A group will be created. You can now drag and drop tabs in the new group. You can also assign names to tab groups.

Add-ons Manager

While browsing the menu options, you will see that the addons center has been revamped and looks prettier now. It shows you Addon Collections, Recommended addons and Featured addons, all of which are easily installable from the window.

The addons you have installed have their own section and that is changed too. It now uses colors to differentiate between running addons, addons that have just been installed, those that are not compatible and those that are disabled. A minor annoyance is the usage of the word “Extension” in the sidebar while “Add-on” is used in the messages and titles e.g. “Add-ons Manager”. That needs to be fixed.

Sync

You can also see the new Firefox Sync as a menu item. Firefox Sync is a service that allows you to synchronize your bookmarks, history, bookmarks and even open tabs online and then access them from other Firefox browser, a bit like the XMarks service and addon works. Now that is included in Firefox – a feature many users will like, especially those that use Firefox on different computers or laptops.

You’ll need a Firefox Sync account for that, and the window will ask you to register for one if you don’t have one already.

Downloads

The Download window hasn’t changed at all since Firefox 3.6. Even the menu is still the same. The button to “Open Download Folder” is still missing – a feature which I really liked from Firefox 2. Hopefully I’ll have an addon to put it back for me.

Options

The Options Menu has a few items which you usually found under the “View” menu of Firefox 3, as well as an option to move the Tab Bar to the bottom of the screen. Don’t know why you’d want that, but it’s there.

The Options window itself hasn’t changed much. You will notice the new “Sync” tab to allow you to customize your Firefox Sync options.

Under the Advanced – General tab, you will find the new “Do not track” feature of Firefox. Essentially it tells websites and ad networks not to track you as you’d have expected. However it is left to websites to decide whether to oblige or not. Currently, the feature is not widely implemented by websites and ad networks so you won’t see much difference. Hopefully, checking this in the feature will prevent websites tracking your browsing habits and serving ads based on that. A good move for privacy… in concept for now.

Update:

You can enable an option under the Tabs tab (lol), which will allow you to get Tab Group previews as Aero Peek, saving you the need to Ctrl+Shift+E and putting the feature for quick access from the taskbar. “Nice!” say people who love opening tons of tabs!

Performance

Time to wrap up this short review. Firefox 4 hasn’t reduced its memory usage by far. 222MB usage for 8 open tabs (2 with Flash content) and almost no addon (they were not compatible!). Not very good I say. Chrome uses about 100MB for the same tabs.

Firefox 4 passes ACID3 test with a score of 97/100. Great score!

Under the hood, Firefox 4 includes numerous performance upgrades like using hardware acceleration for graphics, support of WebM for HD videos, enhancing javascript performance to make online applications more fluid and better HTML5 compatibility, plus usual bug fixes and security fixes. You’ll find all of those additions in the Release Notes if you wish to learn more.

Conclusion

So that’s it for this review of Firefox 4. I’d say it’s more about correcting annoyances and making usability enhancements rather than introducing revolutionary features, while imitating Chrome’s simple user interface. Is that the trend now? Internet Explorer 9 and now Firefox 4? In the end, Firefox remains a great browser. At first, you may feel lost by the new user interface but when addons become compatible again, we may see quite a few creative ones pop up to work with Firefox 4.

Thanks for reading!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Firefox 4: The Review

I am a fervent user of the great browser known as Mozilla Firefox. Been using it since it was version 2.x something. I was so tired with IE offloading tons of viruses on me at that time that I figured that there MUST be a safer browser out there in the wild. I tried a few before settling to Mozilla, namely Maxthon and Kmeleon. I should write an article about alternative browsers someday. *note to self*

Anyway, I like Firefox a lot, or affectionately FF if you want. 3.5x is awesome. 4.x promises to be even better. However, there is one problem that’s been around Firefox since like, forever: memory consumption.

FF consumes a lot of memory when you have many tabs open. And I often have a lot of tabs opened. Specially multiple links from the same source opened in different tabs. I got that bad habit; if it can be considered a bad habit.

So, I was casually browsing someday with around 30 tabs opened when I discovered a nice addon called: BarTab. Don’t ask how they came up with that name, I got no idea. Why would anyone name a memory-recovery addon “BarTab”?

Its purpose is to unload tabs that you haven’t visited in a while, and load them again when you focus (click) on them. It’s like opening the tab again, but automatically.

This simple concept allows you to save quite some memory, specially if you like to leave tabs on, do something else, and come back to your previously opened tabs after a while. It’ll not be a major saving, but around 30-40MB of savings are inorder.

To illustrate and prove if this addon works, I conducted a small test. I opened around 20 tabs from random Google searches (I hope I didn’t catch any virus in doing that!) as well as a few media pages like DeviantArt, Youtube and Toyota Europe’s website (Nice music!). I then let BarTab do its magic while leaving the tabs untouched in the background for a minute or two. (Time delay is configurable).

The results, before and after are below:

Before

After

Not bad huh? The 20-ish tabs are still there, but unloaded. The only annoying thing about BarTab is that you have to wait a bit for pages to reload. If you have a fast connection, it shouldn’t be a problem, but for those with slower connections, you will probably find the delay slightly annoying.

That’s all for BarTab for now. If you have more tricks to reduce FF’s memory usage, comment box’s found below!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Using BarTab to reduce Firefox Memory Consumption

Firefox 3.5 was officially released today, Tuesday 30th. The released candidate (RC) was available for a while back, but the version we are talking here is what I call the Final version, that is officially released.

If you haven’t done so already, go to Mozilla and download your copy. If you are lazy, you can try Help – Check for Updates directly in your Firefox 3. If you are already in RC, get the final! Got to show Internet Explorer 8 who’s the boss around here (and to stop MS from bragging any further)! Note that some of your addons will not work, such as Tabmix Plus, one of my favorites. Their forum have an updated beta copy, but for now, I downloaded alternatives (TabKit) to compensate. Do a backup of your stuff, if ever you want to restore.

Now is not too many upgrades to comment on, so I’ll just go on and review those I’ve seen worthwhile of mention. And some that operate in the background and that you will not see.

I have to start somewhere, right? So let’s see what changed in the immediate interface. You will see that Mozilla (now referred as ‘they’) have modified the tab bar to make it more like Chrome’s. Note that small + button near the tab? That’s your new tab button. It follows you now. Apart from that, not much to see in the main window. Looks mostly the same as Firefox 3.

Now the menus. All the menus are similar, save for the History and Tools menu. In History, you now have the option to undo closed tabs, but now, also closed windows. That’s pretty cool for people who use multiple windows. As for me, I prefer a ton of tabs rather than more than 2 windows at once.

In Tools, you will find the Private Browsing mode, or what we common folks call the “porn mode” – this is what it’ll be mainly used for. Legitimate use: accessing your bank account. Or so the “innocent” claim they use it for!

Some other interesting features you might find interesting are:

• Ripping out tabs: Drag a tab away from the tab bar and release. Voila, you now have a window, with that tab inside. Pretty cool way for creating new windows, rather than using File – New Window, copy-pasting the address and whatever. You can also drag out tabs, and put them in other existing windows. Well, you can do a lot of cool things with dragging tabs now. If you don’t want to drag, right-click and choose Open in a New Window for the same effect.

• Firefox 3.5 is promoting porn mode or what? In the History sidebar, and some other places History-related, there is an option to “Forget about this site”. I’ll leave this one to your creative uses.

• Tracemonkey was included. That means faster Javascript. Well, a lot of stuff Javascript-related faster. If you want the gory innards, check out Mozilla’s Tracemonkey Wiki.

• Video and Audio HTML5 tags are now supported in-built. This will probably mean that sometime in the future, you’ll not need to install Adobe Flash or whatever other plugins to view video and have audio on websites. I can’t begin to imagine what crazy ideas developers will come up with to over-exploit those! Just wait and see.

• AwesomeBar filters: You know what AwesomeBar is right? It’s the address bar, for those of you who don’t. Well, now when typing in it, you can filter what results it returns. It’s easy enough to use the filters. As for remembering the symbols, I can’t say the same. Who came up with those? I also gave you a way to remember those. My own personal method. E.g. Try “Geekscribes *” in the address bar without quotes.
  • History only = ^    (Up symbol, like, from where you came previously. Assume you are navigating down something)
  • Bookmarks only = *    (The * symbol is on the 8 key, that looks like a B symbol. B for Bookmarks)
  • Tagged Pages = +    (+ for pages that I like)
  • URLs only = @    (The @ symbol is used in email addresses. URLs are called addresses)
  • Title/Tags only = #    (That one I don’t know how to remember!)

• You can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or bookmarks with *, or tagged pages with +. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type @, and for title/tags only use #.

• Geo-location. Basically, now your browser knows where in the world you are. So when you are looking for pizzas in Google Maps, it’ll show you what’s closest to you. Haven’t tried that personally. I’m just scared of the implications. My browser knows from where I’m browsing porn! That’s so scary. It may even lead me to some unwanted locations (in the real world) to find what I’m looking for. I hope I’m joking, because seeing Google pointing me to the nearest porn would be awkward!

• Session restore improved. If ever your browser crashes, on the next restart of the browser, you are prompted to restore the previous session, complete with ticks to choose what tabs and windows to restore. That’s very nice of Mozilla. It’s directly there in the browser window, like one of those Pages not Found messages. You get the idea. Fortunately, I was able to recreate it by End Task’ing Firefox via Taskmanager.

• Did I mention that Firefox 3.5 is fast? It’s amazingly responsive, and hardly lags. Memory usage is still quite too. 127MB for 5 tabs and around 20 addons installed. It also loads fast. Less than 2 seconds it seems.

Not much to say apart from that. I’ll leave the rest of the goodies for you to discover. After you go, come back here and give us some comments and opinions about Firefox 3.5!

(Some info taken from Lifehacker)

This article comes from GeekScribes

Firefox 3.5 officially released: Reviewed!

At first, I thought it was a problem with character encoding. Changing to UTF-8 did not solve the problem, nor did switching off Auto-Detect from View menu – Character Encoding solve anything. Well, basically, after a lot of trying out solutions, it was not a problem with charset or encoding.

I tried other solutions but none seemed to work. One of them gave me a clue as to what the problem is. It was going to Tools – Options – Content – (Fonts & Colors) Advanced – (uncheck) “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”. This rendered all pages without custom fonts, except my default of Times New Roman. The problem was solved.

The workaround indicated that the problem resided with my fonts. I thus went and checked out the website source and the stylesheet and found out that Smashing Magazine uses Helvetica font as primary font for h2 tags. This line was found in the source and stylesheet respectively (I shortened the code with …’s):

<ul class="topic-list">
<li>
<h2><a...> ... </a></h2>

ul.topic-list h2{font:44px Helvetica,Arial, ...}

If you don’t know, Helvetica is a proprietary font and doesn’t come with installs of Windows by default. It didn’t come with mine, on both my XP and Vista installs, so I’m assuming it doesn’t come by default.

The Solution:

So what can you do? Apparently, nothing. You cannot acquire the Helvetica font for free and install it. Unless you are willing to pay for it, you are stuck.

Now, if you are crafty enough, you can use some Google powers and try to find the font by… let’s just say, alternative means. I am not posting links here, because I do not encourage piracy. I managed to find a copy of Helvetica somewhere, installed it and problem was solved. You can see the results below.

If you do want to do what I did, you just need to find a copy of Helvetica from somewhere, install it, restart Firefox and the problem should be solved.

Another plausible solution would be for sites with such problems to substitute their fonts for those people do have on their machines. But we cannot require this from site designers. Another way would be to be able to find an addon or similar for Firefox that would allow for font substitution. If you know of such a solution, you are free to share it with us.

A bit of strangeness here is that, since Firefox did not find Helvetica on my machine, it should have used Arial. I cannot understand why it did not.

If you do install the Helvetica font and still get the problem, maybe it’s another font being used and that you don’t have.In this case: check the website source, find which element it is, search the stylesheet for that element, find which font it is and install the font. Restart Firefox, and the problem should be solved.

Hope my solution helps. That’s it! Kinda easy, wasn’t it?

Note: I uninstalled Helvetica after I tested the solution, for those of you who were interested!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Firefox displays weird characters as headings (solution)

I’ve spent countless minutes searching for a feed-reader, or news aggregator if you wish. I’ve tried so many freeware and open-source apps, but kept away from the paying ones. But hell, not even one could provide all the features I wanted in a single software. So what is it that I look for in a feed-reader? What are the essential features? I made up a list! I actually listed down all those before I searched for the ultimate feed client. I was that desperate!

Here’s the list, in order of priority:

• A nice, clean interface!

• Newspaper layout: I seriously like that. I want all my news from the feed I read to be displayed in small boxes, with the title and an excerpt from the news article. Maybe an image too, like a small passport photo. There should also be icons that allow me to mark the item as read, flag it in a separate folder, open it in an external browser, open it in a separate tab in the feed reader itself or simply, expand the article right in the newspaper so that I can read the text directly there.

• A newsticker: This is an essential feature for me. I want a small horizontal bar on my desktop that scrolls all news items for the day at a customizable speed. When I click on an item in the ticker, it optionally loads my browser with the news page, or loads the feed reader with the news item loaded in a new tab. All this being customizable. I also need a way to temporarily pause the ticker, scroll it in either direction, hide it to a single small bar, or close it. Pausing my cursor on the news item must give me a short excerpt of the news item, as well as the site it came from and the date/time it was written. The ability to randomly shuffle the feeds before display would be cool too.

• Information overload management: Give me a way to instantly mark all feeds that are older than X days or hours as read, and remove them from my sight. I don’t want to have to read 2000+ items.

• Read all news items from all feeds in a single, long page: I click somewhere, and a newspaper with all the news items from all the feeds are added to it. There may be “next page” buttons, I don’t mind. But I want one long page with everything in. Just the headlines would be ok for this, no need for images or stuff that would slow the reading.

• OPML support: I want to be able to export/import feeds easily from other computers.

• Online Sync: I want to be able to sync by feeds on all computers I use.

• Shortcuts that make sense: Like middle click to open the news item in a new tab. Middle clicking a tab closes it. The keyboard arrows move pages, and scroll the page up and down.

However, none of the clients I tried offered all of these in one package. The closest I came to my vision of a great RSS feed reader was with Newsgator’s FeedDemon. More on that later. for now, you get a whole list of the clients I tried, and the stuff I liked and disliked about them. These don’t come in any order, so just skip if you don’t want to read everything… By the way if I don’t mention a feature, doesn’t mean it’s not there! Also, when I don’t mention cross-platform or platform-independent, the client is Windows-only. Also, all the applications I mention below are open-source or freeware.

If you ask, “has this guy really tested all those readers?” I answer yes! I do not claim to have tested each of them thoroughly, but I’m giving you my first impressions about the clients, and what I liked/didn’t like about them.

FeedDemon

FeedDemon: The reader I am currently using, coming from Nick Bradburry of NewsGator. It doesn’t offer a ticker yet, but I read on the homepage that it’s a planned feature. Among all the readers I have tested, FeedDemon is what I consider to be the best reader. The interface is simply marvellous, and the sheer number of options that FeedDemon offers is amazing. Firstly, the layout. On starting, you are given a start page, with all your feeds, the number of unread items per feed, but also the feeds you pay most/least attention to. Unfortunately, there is still no way to read all news items from all feeds. The developer says it will slow down browsing if this was made, but I still want it. Even if only headlines are displayed.

The Newspaper style is what I use. It displays the headlines of all the news from a particular feed, or all the feeds within a folder. This is ok enough for me. Within the newspaper, each news item has a set of icons, the most important being: mark as read, flag the article and open in a new tab. You can also auto-mark feeds as read. There is also a really interesting feature, with a small + symbol, which when clicked expands the news item right there in the newspaper, showing text etc.

Another essential feature of FeedDemon which I really like is the Panic button. Got like, 2000 feeds waiting? Just hit the panic button, choose to mark feeds as read depending on a time or date (e.g. all feeds older than 48 hours are marked as read and removed). This will significantly reduce your reading load.

You also have clean up wizards to clear up the database of clutter, the option to set the refresh period, lots of customizability and shortcuts. You can also have Newspaper styles, although I only use the Blue Vista one. There is also a news panel where all headlines are displayed, but for me, it’s hidden. The Newspaper-style-layout is enough. Basically, FeedDemon did most of what I wanted, save for the ticker and even that may come soon.

But FeedDemon has its problems too, though not that many. I still want my ticker! I still can’t read all news from all feeds in one big Newspaper page. FeedDemon may get a tad slow when updating and managing large number of feeds, but a hit on the panic button clears that out. FeedDemon is not platform-independent, but it doesn’t need .Net or stuff like that.

A side note about FeedDemon: Its forum is really active, and you can get lots of tips there. The Feature Request section seems to be considered too, unlike other forums I’ve came across in my search.

That’s it for my favorite reader, and moving on to other readers which I’ve considered.

FeedReader

FeedReader: Another open-source client according to the site. This one has different layouts depending on what you want. You can have RSS Owl’s 3 panel layout, you can have the Newspaper-type layout (“River of news”) and the 3 panes (vertical) layout. It also offered the ticker! I can also read all news from all feeds in a single page! You can clean the database, and hide read feeds if you wish. There’s also smartfeeds which is cool, allowing you to group feeds based on the keywords they contain, though I don’t use this feature. Whoa, wait! I got all the features! I must be happy! Nope…

There are a few troubles. The news-bar (ticker) is not as customizable as I wanted it to be. I can’t mark items as read directly from it. I can’t pause it when my cursor is on an item. Also, FeedReader tends to get a little slow when lots of feeds are there.

FeedReader is my second favorite feed-reader. It will get a lot better as it progresses in versions. For now, it’s still not my ultimate reader.

Newzie

Newzie: Another of my favourites. This is where I started in my quest for RSS readers. It offered me everything: Ticker (unfortunately not dockable. It was floating on my desktop!) which was very customizable, pausable etc… A news-paper style. Information overload management through mark all as read, an innovative layout that displayed feeds in color codes, with red with the most unread, green with the least. It had loads of display modes, including the 3-panel, all while keeping the interface clean. OPML support! And it was fast! In short, it was the near-ultimate RSS feed reader. Had everything I wanted. But? It is no longer updated. Last update was in March 2007. This is really sad. I really wish that the developers make Newzie open-source. It’s a truly fantastic RSS reader that deserves more development. Please Newzie developers!

RSSOwl

RSS Owl: RSS Owl is a fine client, written in Java making it cross-platform compatible. It’s open-source which I like. It has a nice enough interface, with panels for feeds, headlines and the actual content. Clicking on the headline loads the content. It’s pretty fast at what it does considering that only headlines get loaded first. However, it doesn’t offer me the Newspaper-type reading, nor does it offer a news ticker.

Snarfer

Snarfer: Another nice reader. Has the Newspaper style reading, as well as. It is fast! It also has the ability to mark items as read and remove them. No ticker unfortunately. There is another major problem (at least for me) with Snarfer. I can’t close that “News about Snarfer” tab. It’s plain annoying! Ok, I appreciate the developer’s efforts. I don’t mind if you load the tab everytime Snarfer loads. But hell, give me a way to close it! Also, while browsing their forums, it didn’t seem to me as if the developers interact with users often. Most of the threads have 0, 1 or 2 posts on average.

SharpReader

SharpReader: Same type of interface as RSS Owl. No ticker. No newspaper style. Two of my most important features are not there, so I didn’t use it for too long. It is a fine reader though. It’s fast, and has a clean and simple interface. The problem is that it uses .Net and requires the framework. I tend not to like apps that have dependencies like that. But it’s not a huge problem, so it shouldn’t affect its usage.

BottomFeeder

BottomFeeder: It offers the Newspaper layout as well as the 3-panel layout. No ticker unfortunately. It is cross-platform which is a plus. The download page offers “executables” for a lot of platforms. The interface seems to be a bit cluttered for a feed reader. An interesting point is that it is written in Smalltalk.

ThinFeeder

ThinFeeder: Simple interface, 3-panels. No newspaper-style. No ticker. Has ability to mark all items as read though. OPML support’s there too. It is also cross-platform, being coded in Java.

What about Firefox addons. Have I tried them? Of course! However, there is a slight problem with keeping lots of feeds in Firefox. It slows the browser and increases its already-high memory consumption. In fact, that is why I wanted a separate client for reading RSS feeds. Nevertheless, I tried those addons:

Brief

Brief: Best Firefox RSS reader in my opinion. No ticker. But it offers a really nice Newspaper-style interface. It’s also fast, and nice to use. A superbly interesting feature is that Brief can automatically mark a news item as read as soon as it is displayed to you. E.g. As you reach a point in the newspaper, all the feeds you are currently seeing are automatically marked as read. This is optional by the way. Cool! You can also optionally switch to headlines view, and mark all items as read. It also has a Status Bar icon with unread count per feed and notifications in option. Brief is my favourite RSS Addon for Firefox. Try it, if you want a Firefox-based RSS reader. It offers you a dedicated environment for reading and managing feeds. I don’t have any problems with Brief. I switched just because my Firefox was becoming fat and eating up too many resources. If ever Firefox eats less resources, Brief is what I’ll use again.

WizzRSS

WizzRSS: I simply did not like the (cluttered) interface that requires lots of scrolling through lists, and the way it handled feeds. It acted more as a sidebar, rather than a dedicated client. Therefore, I moved on.

Sage

Sage-Too / Sage: I liked the interface on this one. It allows a great Newspaper-style. At one point, Brief was not working for me, and I used Sage-Too. It was a good experience. The interface is a bit cluttered as compared to Brief, but it’s workable. There is a small quirk I noticed, and I don’t know if it was just me. I wanted to use middle-click to open news items in a background tab, but it didn’t work.  It’s a good addon for RSS feeds.

RSS Ticker

RSS Ticker: This one was a nice addon. I used it together with Brief. It adds a small bar near the Status Bar of Firefox, and it acts as a RSS ticker. It’s just the ticker, no fancy window or anything. I had both of the features I most wanted in Firefox itself. Putting my mouse on an item paused the ticker, gave me a description as well as other info about that particular news item. Clicking it loaded the item in a background tab. However, there was a few issues with it, such as marking items as Read, didn’t really do it, and they tend to recur. There was also some lag issues. It’s still kind of usable.

That was a long search, but I have found my answer. The ultimate RSS reader for desktop doesn’t exist yet, sadly. There are clients that come extremely close to my vision of ultimate, but none have reached it yet. The clients have things missing, or quirks to iron out. Or some of them just stopped updating, when they were close to reaching my ideal which is sad. Others are very far away, looking more like email clients rather than RSS readers. RSS involves information overload, and there must be ways to control that. Some clients offer them, most don’t: specially the email-client-looking ones.

Finally, the best I could find are: FeedDemon for Desktop and Brief for Firefox. None offer what I want completely, but both are very usable for me.

Now that you have read my opinions about RSS readers, let me hear yours! Do you use web-based or desktop-based or browser-based RSS readers? Which ones do you use? Anything I forgot to mention? Anything I mentioned which is incorrect? The comment section follows the article, so see you there!

This article comes from GeekScribes

In search of the ultimate desktop RSS reader