I’ve tried Netvibes, but I’m just not into the “start page” thing. Even on the net, I’m for simple tools that do the one thing well.

Xu,

good catch on the refreshing thing. I read quite low volume feeds and rarely comment on other blogs, so I’ve never noticed that. I was wondering about how Google does their refreshing, but that delay thing never occured to me.

Vincent,

my feed browsing habits are really similar. I don’t see the point of subscribing high-volume news sites or aggregator sites. You’re too tempted just to skim the headlines and click “Mark all as read”. I prefer to browse those sites, because the experience, the “human package” as you call it, is so much more better.

You also hit a good point on the desktop RSS reader development stagnation. That’s one reason why I dropped the desktop apps, clicking through to open (yet another) browser window felt so, like, last century =)

…and Jeremy, I’m quite sure the Reader team at Google get teased about lack of search on a daily basis already. But, it’s easy to say that there should be a search. But how should it be implemented? I started to think about this and it actually gets pretty interesting pretty quick.

As we know, Google aims for simple UIs. Should the search go through your feeds or all feeds it knows? For what timespan? Should it index only the feed or the links it has (think abbreviated posts)? It actually gets a bit more complicated really quickly than what you’d originally imagine. Or maybe I just want to give Google a benefit of doubt… =)

I believe it’s a shame that GOOGLE Reader doesn’t include any SEARCH feature within Google Reader.

Because of this (I sincerely think they’re making fun of their users here), I’m switching back one more time to Netvibes. Netvibes is now much faster than it has been in the past, and it’s getting better and better whilst I’ve seen no major improvement (but Gears) in Google Reader in the last 6 months.

So, just like John Wilson, I vote for Netvibes.

If you’re into RSS readers only and can actually read French, I highly recommend Olivier Ezratty’s work on RSS reader top performers. It’s all here:

http://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2007/rss-blog-tools-update/

http://www.oezratty.net/wordpress/2006/choisir-son-lecteur-rss/

But I agree, desktop RSS readers aren’t made for mass market (anymore ?).

So every-time I click on a link or what to comment it opens my browser, which is illogical. In my opinion, the prefect rss-reader integrates with the rest of the web. One reader, many channels of media. Safari or any other web-browser fits that profile for me.

If this seems like I’m whining, fine. But I hope that software designers read this blog also and design software that actually makes sense to the end-user, not just to geeks (and machines).

So instead, I look at aggregators, like Slashdot, Digg, Techmeme, and Metafilter, and have editors present nicely formatted stories and comments on it. That way I get the effect of rss, packaged in a nice human package.

There are of course 9-10 blogs that I follow, via rss. And other blogs, like Dave Winer or John Gruber, who already keep their posts so short and update daily, that I can just browse to their site and know there’s (usually interesting) content there.

What can I say, I’m a particular individual when I comes to news. And I refuse to be treated like a machine also. It’s enough that my ipod and xbox catch rss-feeds.

Eh, to answer your question: I use Safari for my rss and browsing, and have the same sites loaded in a igoogle-page for holiday access.