RSS feed reading in Firefox

Google Reader, arguably the most widely-used feed aggregation tool, is being unceremoniously dumped and shut down at the end of June. As such, those who spend a significant chunk of their time consuming RSS or Atom content have been searching for a suitable replacement. There are a variety of options available, from third-party commercial services to self-hosted web apps to desktop applications. Trade-offs are involved simply in choosing which application type to adopt; for example, a web service provides access from anywhere, but it also relies on the availability of a remote server (whether someone else administrates it or not). But there is at least one other option worth exploring: browser extensions.

As Luis Villa pointed out in April, browsers do at best a mediocre job of making feed content discoverable, and they do nothing to support feed reading directly. But there are related features in Firefox, such as "live bookmarks," which blur together the notion of news feeds and periodically polling a page for changes. Several Firefox add-ons attempt to build a decent feed-reading interface where none currently exists—not all of them exploit the live bookmark functionality for this, although many do. Since recent Firefox releases are capable of synchronizing both bookmarks and add-ons, it lets the user access the same experience across multiple desktop and laptop machines (although an extension-based feed reader does not offer universal availability, as a purely web-based solution does).

Bookmarks, subscriptions; potato, potahto

The most lightweight option available for recent Firefox builds is probably MicroRSS, which offers nothing more than a list of subscribed feeds down the left hand margin, and text of the entries from the selected feed on the right. For some users that may be plenty, of course, but as a practical replacement for Google Reader it falls short, since there is no way to import an existing list of subscriptions (typically as an Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) file). It also does not count unread items, much less offer searching, sorting, starring, or other news-management features. On the plus side, it is actively maintained, but the license is not specified.

Feed Sidebar is another lightweight option. It essentially just displays the existing "live bookmarks" content in a persistent Firefox sidebar. This mechanism requires the user to subscribe to feeds as live bookmarks, but it has the benefit of being relatively simple. The top half of the sidebar displays the list of subscriptions, with each subscription as a separate folder; its individual items are listed as entries within the folder, which the user must click to open in the browser. Notably, the Firefox "sidebar" is browser chrome and not a page element, which makes the feed sidebar visible in every tab, as opposed to confining the feed reading experience to a single spot. Feed Sidebar is licensed under GPLv2, which is a tad atypical for Firefox extensions, where the Mozilla Public License (MPL) dominates.

When it comes to the simple implementations, it is also worth mentioning that Thunderbird can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds natively. This functionality is akin to the email client's support for NNTP news; like newsgroups, a subscription is presented to the user much as a POP or IMAP folder is. Feeds with new content appear in the sidebar, new messages are listed in the top pane, and clicking on any them opens the content in the bottom message pane. Subscribing to news feeds does require setting up a separate "Blogs and News Feeds" account in Thunderbird, though, and users can only read one feed at a time—one cannot aggregate multiple feeds into a folder, for example.

Moving up a bit on the functionality ladder, Sage is an MPL-1.1-licensed extension that stores your subscribed feeds in a (user-selectable) bookmark folder. For reading, it provides a Firefox sidebar with two panes; the upper one presents a list of the subscriptions, and the lower one presents a list of available articles from the selected subscription. The main browser tab shows a summary of each entry in the selected feed, although opening any entry opens up the corresponding page on the original site, rather than rendering it inside the feed-reader UI. As rendering the original page in the browser might suggest, Sage does not store any content locally, so it does not offer search functionality.

The project is actively developed on GitHub, although it is also worth noting that one of the project's means of fundraising is to insert "affiliate" links into feed content that points toward certain online merchants.

The high end

Digest is a fork of a no-longer-developed extension called Brief. It attempts to provide a more full-featured feed-reading experience than some of the other readers; it keeps a count of unread items for each feed, allows the user to "star" individual items or mark them as unread, and quite a few other features one would expect to find in a web service like Google Reader.

As is the case with several other extensions, Digest stores feed subscriptions in a (selectable) bookmarks folder. However, it also downloads entries locally—allowing the user to choose how long old downloads are preserved (thankfully), which enables it to offer content search. It also renders its entire interface within the browser tab in HTML, unlike some of the competition. Digest is licensed as MPL 2.0, and is actively under development by its new maintainer at GitHub. It can import (and export) OPML subscription files.

Like Digest, Newsfox replicates much of the Google Reader experience inside Firefox. The look is a bit different, since Newsfox incorporates a three-pane interface akin to an email client. This UI is implemented in browser chrome, but unlike the earlier live-bookmark–based options, it still manages to reside entirely within one tab. That said, Newsfox expects to find subscriptions in the default Live Bookmarks folder, and there does not appear to be a way to persuade it to look elsewhere. Perhaps more frustrating, it either does not understand subfolders within the Live Bookmarks folder, or it chooses to ignore them, so dozens or hundreds of feeds are presented to the user in a single, scrolling list.

On the plus side, Newsfox offers multi-tier sorting; one can tell it to first sort feeds alphabetically (increasing or decreasing), then sort by date (again, increasing or decreasing), and so on, up to four levels deep. It can also encrypt the locally-download feed content, which might appeal to laptop users, and is an option none of the other extensions seems to feature. Downloaded entries can be searched, which is a plus, and on the whole the interface is fast and responsive, more so than Digest's HTML UI.

The last major option on the full-fledged feed-aggregator front is Bamboo, an MPL-1.1-licensed extension that appears to be intentionally aiming for Google Reader replacement status—right down to the UI, which mimics the dark gray "Google toolbar" currently plastered across all of the search giant's web services. The interface is rendered in HTML, and uses the decidedly Google Reader–like sidebar layout, rendering feed content within the right-hand pane. Bamboo supports all of the basic features common to the high-end aggregators already discussed: OPML import/export, folders, search, sorting, marking items as read/unread, and locally storing feed content. It also adds more, such as the ability to star "favorite" items, the ability to save items for offline reading, a toggle-able headline-or-full-item display setting, and a built-in ad blocker.

Interestingly enough, despite its comparatively rich feature set, Bamboo uses a bookmark folder to keep track of feed subscriptions, but it does not allow the user to select the folder where subscriptions are saved. Instead, like Newsfox, it only examines the default Live Bookmarks folder.

And the rest

If one goes searching for "RSS" on the Firefox Add-ons site, there are plenty more options that turn up, many of which reflect entirely different approaches to feed aggregation. For example, SRR offers a "ticker"-style scroll of headlines from subscribed feeds, which is useful for a handful of feeds at best. Dozens or hundreds, however, will overpower even the toughest attention span. Or there is Newssitter, which provides a "bookshelf"-style interface that seems visually designed for reading primarily on a mobile device. That may meet the needs of many news junkies, of course, but it bears little resemblance to the Google Reader experience; getting a quick overview of dozens of feeds is not possible, for example.

Selecting a Google Reader replacement is not a simple task; everyone uses the service in slightly different ways, and all of the options offer different (and overlapping) subsets of the original product's feature set.

The bare-bones feed reading extensions all have big limitations that probably make them less useful as a drop-in replacement; for instance they may not check for new content in the background, and they certainly do not provide much search functionality. For a user with a lot of subscriptions, supplementary features like searching and saving items can take the application from mediocre to essential. After all, it is frequently hard to backtrack to a barely-remembered news story weeks or months after reading the original feed.

To that end, the more fleshed-out Google Reader alternatives offer a much more useful experience in the long run. Only time will tell how solid they are over the long haul, of course—it is not beyond reason to think that some of them will start to slow down or wobble with months of saved content to manage. On the other hand, none of them can offer one key feature of Google Reader: the months' (or in many cases years') worth of already read news items. Most individual feeds do not publish their site's entire history, but Google Reader could search years' worth of already read material. That is just one of the things people lose when a web service shuts down.

Based on my early experiments, Bamboo offers the most features, while Newsfox is faster, but Digest is more flexible. It is tempting to fall back on that familiar old saying: you pays your nickel and you takes your chances (though sans nickel in free software circles). But because all three options can follow and display the same set of feeds, it may be worth installing more than one and giving them a simultaneous test drive for a week or so. At the very least, Firefox can synchronize the bookmarks and add-ons, providing you with some way to get at your subscriptions when away from home—at least if there is a Firefox installation nearby.