Brief - RSS Reader for Firefox Dynamic Bookmarks

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 way to utilize the feature 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 offered all the features that I was looking for.

I wanted a common view for all unread entries sorted by date and recency, I wanted it to be lightweight, and I didn't want it to be another program as I wanted to use Firefox for that so I eliminated most 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 suits me better than the original one), there are a handful of reasonable options, and it integrates with Firefox's built in RSS-capabilities as well using it's own dynamic bookmarking 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.

Brief offers many options that you can play around with. You can change the interval in which feeds are checked for new items, decide when to remove old articles, whether you want notifications to be displayed when updates are discovered, or customize how feeds are displayed by the extension.

Brief on top of this supports shortcuts for nearly every action you can take. You can use j and k to navigate between feeds, enter to open the currently selected article or m to mark the current item as read.

So if you happen to be in the market for RSS Readers, make sure to check this one out.

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