Battle of the Aggregators

As previously mentioned, I've been struggling to find a good news aggregator for Firefox, to replace the excellent on included with Safari. First I tried the acclaimed Sage Firefox extension, which was lacking (no full unread view, no number of unread articles).

After that I looked into NetNewsWire ($24.95), and the Lite (free, gimped) version of it. While it seems a competent chunk of code, it is still missing the ability to see all of your unread articles, regardless of feed. Also the given interface seemed to be lacking, unless I wanted to shell over money for the registered version. Nothing seriously wrong with it, it just failed to grab me.

After some serious Google sleuthing I came across a nice OSS aggregator for OS X, called Vienna. Vienna seems to be a superior newsfeeder to NetNewsWire in that it is open source (meaning free-as-in-beer AND speech!, which covers the ideological and thrifty goodness). It is as full featured as NNW (as far as I can tell). And it also has smart folders, to match the rest of the OS X environment. Included in the initial install are smart folder for unread messages, todays messages, and marked messages. Yes, you can flag messages just like in Apple's Mail.app or in Thunderbird, which is an awesome feature.

I'd recommend Vienna over NNW. Support OSS whenever possible, especially when the OSS project is better than it's closed competition (hence Firefox is better than Opera, even if FF is proving to be as big a memory whore as remembered!).

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