I have been looking for an equivalent for the mac only Feed reader software NetNewsWire on Windows and I think I have found something that comes the closest yet.
FeedReader is a free RSS reader for Windows written by Toomas Toots.
I have tried other readers such as RSSOwl, Feed Demon but none of them come close to NetNewsWire for being as easy to use and having the feature set that I have been looking for. Up until now I have mainly been using Thunderbird on Windows as this more closely matched what I am looking for.
I have tried FeedReader in the past but I recently decided to download it and try it again having noticed that it is now on version 3.0.*.
What I like
- FeedReader has the same simplicity that I'm used to in NetNewsWire
- The ability to look at the data for all feeds in a folder by just clicking on the containing folder. This is something that Thunderbird frustratingly doesn't have.
- Matching NetNewsWire you can mark everything as read really easily, on an item, feed folder or global level. This again is one step above Thunderbird as it only has marking items or individual feeds as read.
- The support for the feed:// protocol. This make it possible to load feeds in from FireFox via the Feed Your Reader extension. This is just fantastic as adding feeds to Thunderbird was a real chore. This matches the functionality to load feeds in to NetNewsWire on the mac.
What I don't like
- The lack of favicons though this is likely to be added in the future (favicons were present in v2.9)
- That it's difficult to set a manual update interval. The auto-update feature is novel but not what I want and to change it I would have to manually update each feed.
- There's no means to sync up NetNewsWire and FeedReader though that's hardly surprising. It would be nice if this was a possibility though.
I would heartily recommend to anyone needing a feed reader on Windows that is the nearest equivalent to NetNewsWire to give FeedReader a spin. If nothing else you can't complain about the price.