RSS Reader
December 18th, 2007 by WaltDoes anyone have recommendations for an RSS reader for Firefox? On my old laptop I used Sage, which was okay, but since I’m reinstalling everything I’m willing to experiment.
Does anyone have recommendations for an RSS reader for Firefox? On my old laptop I used Sage, which was okay, but since I’m reinstalling everything I’m willing to experiment.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Firefox doesn’t have native RSS support yet?
December 18th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Google Reader? Sure, it’s not a slick plugin or anything, but it’s actually incredibly nice. I hate to encourage yet more reliance on the big G, but, well, it’s a great product.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Another voter for Google Reader. Works for me. The new recommendation feature is useful too.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Use the Firefox add-on called LiveClick.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2499
December 18th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
My vote goes to Google Reader. It’s awesome to be able to access your feeds from anywhere.
December 19th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Just two words: Google Reader
December 19th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Even though it has some bugs, posts that go missing on Sundays etc… it’s the best out there. Google Reader
December 19th, 2007 at 1:31 am
I second the idea to use web-based RSS reading, but Google Reader somehow never worked quite nicely for me. You may check the new “beta” interface of the good old Bloglines (http://beta.bloglines.com) (disclaimer: I am using them in Safari on a Mac, but Firefox should be supported even better).
December 19th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Okay everyone and their mom beat me to it, but I heartily recommend Google Reader.
December 19th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Before I read the comments, I was going to suggest Google Reader. Now, I’m going to suggest it anyway.
If, for some reason, you’d prefer a standalone application that’s /almost/ as good as Google Reader, I can recommend version 2.90 of FeedReader, currently available at http://www.oldapps.com/download.php?oldappsid=FeedReader290.exe . (I have no idea if FeedReader 3, open source and available at http://www.feedreader.com/ , is an improvement or not.)
December 19th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
A good one, if you’re interested in a standalone reader on the Mac, is Vienna. It integrates well with Firefox, in the sense that you can ask Firefox to use Vienna for subscribing to new feeds. (The same should go for any standalone RSS reader.)
http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php
December 19th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
I’m a little creeped out about how central Google has become to my using the web, so I’m loath to become even more dependent. (I usually navigate to this site by typing ars mathematica in Google, rather than typing in the URL or using my bookmark.) I would prefer a Firefox plug-in, anyway. I’ll take a look at LiveClick and FeedReader.
December 20th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Another resounding vote for Google reader. Check out the various feature benefits at http://lifehacker.com/software/google-reader/
December 20th, 2007 at 10:06 am
What with all the Google love going around, I’ll try to explain my comment from back at the top: Safari has a feed reader built in, and the method for keeping track of your feeds is called a bookmark. Every time Ars Mathematica updates with a post or a comment, a counter next to my math/physics weblog entry on my bookmark bar increments. Nothing is needed but the browser I’m already using.
December 21st, 2007 at 8:19 am
@John Armstrong:
Firefox’s equivalent in-built RSS support is called “Live Bookmarks” and it’s a bookmark for the RSS feed that opens out like a folder with individual “bookmarks” for each item in the RSS feed. So it probably does more than the description for Safari’s support.
However Google Reader is far superior because it’s easy to tag (individual items and whole feeds), share (via a meta RSS feed), email (inline with access to your GMail contacts), and of course - search! Once you start searching through your RSS feeds, there’s no going back to “bookmarks”.
December 21st, 2007 at 9:09 am
Why would I want to search my RSS feeds? They present news. News comes up, I read it, and I’m done. And what I read is stuff I haven’t heard about already. I would never have heard of the salamander lemma unless it had come up in an RSS feed, and I wouldn’t have known to search for it.
December 22nd, 2007 at 6:49 am
John,
I suspect she meant searching for an article that has already been read.
-John
p.s. Our names suck.
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:34 pm
We could all go by John, if it would make you feel better.
January 1st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Yes, it’s search of content in the feeds over time. So it’s not just what the feed contains this week. A year later, when you want to go back to the articles on the salamander lemma across all the blogs you track, you’ll appreciate search more than hunting through bookmarks. Give it a shot!
January 13th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
This is like what, the 15th vote for google reader. You’re not seeing a biased sample, if you check your server logs you’ll see ‘most everyone uses google reader to access your feeds.