The concept of RSS or newsfeeds in general seemed quite appealing to me the moment I first heard (or read?) about it. But I never managed to find a possibility of utilizing them in a way I liked. I tried standalone-readers like FeedReader, and since I am a FF-enthusiast, I tried Firefox extensions like Sage and Wizz, as well as scroll-readers like infoRSS and took a look at the FeedDemon, but none really seemed to satisfy my needs. I wanted a common view for all unread entries, sorted by date or anything, I wanted it to be lightweight, and I didn’t want it to be another program than my Firefox, so I eliminated all contestants pretty quick.
Luckily, I came across the small Brief Firefox extension which fulfilled all of my wishes. It’s lightweight, it’s a firefox extension, and it has the “unread”-folder as well as a nice and elaborate handling. It’s content-view is skinnable (though I have yet to come across a skin that suited me better than the original one), there are a handful of reasonable options, and it integrates with the Firefox-RSS-capabilities as well using it’s dynamic bookmarks system.
It’s just as the synopsis on the homepage says: “Brief is a light-weight feed reading extension for Firefox. Designed to be easy to use and streamlined, with exactly the right set of features.” – ’nuff said.
So if you happen to be in the market for RSS-Readers, make sure to check this one out.
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it doesnt work with Firefox 3 beta 5 :(
Looks similar to Bloglines.
I use Brief every day. No better RSS Reader than Brief. Thanks for the great posts. Ghacks is #1 blog
After trying Sage and Wizz, I’ve actually become quite a fan of Google Reader. It does meet the criteria of running in firefox ;)
Thanks for your comments!
Jason: I can confirm this, it didn’t work with my FF3b5 either and didn’t have the time to search a solution for this.
Barry: Finding a read article is indeed cumbersome, you’re better off searching it inside specific feeds or the original sites. Regarding the buttons at the bottom of feeds, I had the exact same idea a while back. Turned out, that it is not possible (by decree of the author), but you can still use the double-click to mark it as read.
I’ve tried brief, it slows firefox down very much if it gets too many feeds at once. I guess the google server can handle more :D
(I’ve got 120 feeds I think)
For firefox 3b5 support get the beta version
http://brief.mozdev.org/drupal/node/174