What's your favorite RSS reader?

[Weresmilodon]

A lot of people are using RSS these days, and it feels like a few more start all the time, so this should be somewhat relevant and possible even interesting.

What is your favorite RSS reader, and why?

Personally, i'd go with the RSS reader in Thunderbird 3. It served my needs well, felt quick and responsive, and i never felt like i missed anything. Fully capable of showing all html content of the page, or a more 'standard' RSS feed. I'd never stopped using it if i had a choice.

Unfortunately, i had to upgrade Thunderbird to version 5, and that RSS reader leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, the entire client leaves a lot to be desired, what with how sluggish and slow it feels, but the RSS reader hit me hardest. Commonly not checking for new items unless you view material you already have, and then possibly only finding one out of five. Not registering that you picked another topic, just displaying the same one regardless. Sometimes showing old (as in really old) topics instead of the new ones. I could go on.

Needless to say, i'm looking for something new, or old, or whatever. So, what do you prefer to use, and why? Do you have anything you'd use if you could, but still care to recommend?

And remember, this is for everyone. Hold nothing back.

[samuelmichaels]

Personally, i'd go with the RSS reader in Thunderbird 3. It served my needs well, felt quick and responsive, and i never felt like i missed anything. Fully capable of showing all html content of the page, or a more 'standard' RSS feed. I'd never stopped using it if i had a choice.

Unfortunately, i had to upgrade Thunderbird to version 5, and that RSS reader leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, the entire client leaves a lot to be desired, what with how sluggish and slow it feels, but the RSS reader hit me hardest. Commonly not checking for new items unless you view material you already have, and then possibly only finding one out of five. Not registering that you picked another topic, just displaying the same one regardless. Sometimes showing old (as in really old) topics instead of the new ones. I could go on.

I am using Thunderbird 8 (development). Not that different from TB 5, so I am surprised you are having so many problems with it.
My other reader is Google Reader (online). If you use other google tools, like gmail, calendar, this one is easy.

I've used Omea occasionally, and had no problems with it.

[expedient]

An Apple user perspective on RSS.

Years ago I used NetNewsWire and shortly after found I preferred Vienna. I even played around with the RSS in Safari and Mail for a while but kept going back to Vienna.

When Google Reader came along it offered a way for keeping track of which articles I was reading at both home and work. I'd use Google Reader at work and NetNewsWire 3(?) at home. I tried Gruml for a while but I found it too slow and it had a poor interface, so went quickly back to NetNewsWire.

I got an iPhone for work and put NetNewsWire on that, which was ok and when combined with Google Reader kept all my feeds in sync. Later I got an iPad and I'd been hearing good things about Reeder so I installed that and loved it. Reeder has a lot of quick gestures for getting through lists of articles and a great feature which pulls the text into the app to read without all the web clutter. It also syncs with Google Reader plus it interfaces with Instapaper and Readability for offline reading and makes article recommendation sharing easy in Google Reader along with Pinboard, Delicious, Twitter, etc.

I've since replaced NetNewsWire on my iPhone and Mac with Reeder and use Google Reader when in Windows.


Note: Reeder for Mac, although still completely usable, currently has some minor issues with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, mostly to do with the new gestures.

[Fawks]

Personally, I have never really understood what RSS is. An easy way to see news bulletins?

[expedient]

When news sites didn't publish hundreds of repetitive articles a day basic RSS/Atom feeds allowed me to keep up with the all the main news of the day, just like the TV news headlines. Of course 8-9 years ago the whole article was available in the RSS feed so if you didn't have any interest in being reminded of what a politician looks like you didn't need to also follow-up by actually going to the news site.

Now with large news sites putting up one or two hundred articles in a day, newsreaders allow me to skim through the list to see if I've missed anything interesting. The newer newsreaders, like Reeder, also allow me to pull in the article text (even from multi-page articles) so I can actually read stuff from badly designed sites or ones with excessive advertising.

Where newsreaders really come into their own though is they give me a single location to check for updates across dozens of websites. If I was only regularly checking three to five sites a day a newsreader app would only be of minimal benefit but checking a larger number of sites, some of which might only update irregularly, is much easier than using a regular browser. I still use the usual browsers but most of my webpage reading activity is done in my newsreader. It's also easy to mark articles as interesting, for reading later or share them with friends/colleagues and generally keep track of what you have and haven't read across your regular set of websites.

Need to know when a weekly podcast or monthly story chapter is available? It tells you even when you haven't checked for a while, whether you want to get it early or if you've been away/busy for a week.

[fortress]

I use Outlook as my RSS reader since I am already using it for email. It's nice to just be able to look at one screen and see if I have any new RSS stories / emails.

I mainly use RSS for site updates.
My main ones: BaenCD@thefifthimperium I get a new message whenever he updates the page, or any time there is a post here on the Sennadar forums, front page deals from slickdeals.net, and free/cheap kindle e-book alerts with another, new story updates @ SOL.