I used Sharpreader for years, and I still think it’s the best of the free stand-alone readers, even though it’s not the prettiest, and the mechanism for changing feed properties is about the wonkiest thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to change, because I’m a minimalist at heart, but I just wanted a little more.
While looking around for something that would be just a little easier on the eyes and not so restrictive in terms of user-configuration, I found Newzie. I used it for a couple weeks at home, and I liked how it looked better than Sharpreader, RSSOwl, or Greatnews. The large variety of news reading modes was a welcome change. I used the single column, full-article newspaper view the most, because the headline rarely indicates the content in many of the feeds I subscribe to, such as Ask.Metafilter and all of the Scienceblogs feeds; However, if you have the full posts laid out one after the other, you can skim them easily. This works particularly well for Flickr feeds.
I realized after a couple weeks, however, that I just liked reading things in Sharpreader better. The reason is that Newzie has designed its own novel UI. Right-clicking doesn’t work like you expect, closing and minimizing doesn’t work like you’re used to, and it’s just unpleasant to switch between UI styles like that. Simply clicking a link would open up a IE tab within the application, no matter if you selected “open” or “open in new window”. There was a third option, called “Open (ext.)” that would open the link in IE externally. There was no way to open a firefox window externally if you were using the Gecko rendering engine, and the only way to do it using embedded IE was to install the “Open in Firefox” extension for IE, and right-click and select open link in firefox from the context menu. The way this worked would change depending on what mode you were in, too. Simple things, like right-clicking a feed in the left pane would open a slew of options, none of which were “Mark all read”. Every article container had all these buttons and options that would popup upon mouse-over, but I never used them, because they were for deleting the post or changing the read status or some other thing I didn’t care about. Who wants to manually mark each individual post they read? Who wants to go through and individually delete old, read posts? Another annoying thing was the unnecessary distinction between “New” and “Unread”. If I haven’t read it, it’s new to me, OK? So while I found Sharpreader to be unpleasantly restrictive and minimalist, Newzie was way over the top with unnecessary, cluttered features. The developer should focus on making what features he has coded work right, rather than grafting on a slew of half-ass new ones.
I’m using Sage now, which used to work not so well on pre-2.0 Firefox, but seems to work great in the latest release. It works in the sidebar just like History or Bookmarks do, instead of grafting on some new interface. Marking of items read is done via the browser history, instead of some hack. Because it obeys the conventions of the system within which it operates, I was able to use the Optimoz tweaks extension to auto-hide it in the sidebar, giving me all the navigational ease of a 3-pane interface, with the page presentation of a full window. Because it obeys the conventions of the system within which it operates, you can use a custom stylesheet to display the feed however you’d like, with no need for a little buttons or preference for each style, color, background, font, and so on. This also allows you to benefit from the design capabilities of someone other than the developer. Judging from the available styles, this is a very good thing. The only thing I don’t have that I’d like here is a display of unread messages. There was an extension that purported to do that, but it wasn’t listed on mozilla.org, and wasn’t compatible to 2.0.0.3, so I’m reluctant to mess with it.