Personal experience: on the benefits of an "independent" RSS reader

A subjective story about how I became a QuiteRSS user.

I got acquainted with QuiteRSS in December 2012: a regular RSS reader of "Opera" on Win7 x64 sagged from over two hundred feeds, and the general eating of the "RAM" in the background made me nervous. In the meantime, I tried a dozen different readers, from Feed Demon to the monstrous Omea Reader. FeedReader, RSSXpress, RSSOwl. Either I didn’t figure it out completely, or they just didn’t suit me, or I demanded a lot. Unless I drove RSS in email clients and various PIMs. However, nothing discouraged me from the Opera. Which and how the browser gradually began to fade. What happened then - we know very well: moving to Blink, which stunned the community of “opera-workers”, and the painful search for an alternative. Someone had such a crossroads last summer, someone later. And since I love heavy sites, including on the debt of the craft (you have to track a lot of news sites, blogs, media resources), the "brakes" of the old Presto led to the need to diversify the business long before the improvement of the previous browser engine was stopped. I didn’t need access to RSS every hour, but somehow I didn’t want to keep several hundred megabytes in the background. Given that without that I always keep open with a dozen tabs. In addition, I'm still not a supporter of simultaneously sitting in several browsers, so the “12th Opera” scheme for light sites, something “chrome-like” for social networks, videos and so on. “Ballast” ”I rejected. Perhaps in vain, but each of us has its own quirks. :) how the improvement of the past browser engine was discontinued. I didn’t need access to RSS every hour, but somehow I didn’t want to keep several hundred megabytes in the background. Given that without that I always keep open with a dozen tabs. In addition, I'm still not a supporter of simultaneously sitting in several browsers, so the “12th Opera” scheme for light sites, something “chrome-like” for social networks, videos and so on. “Ballast” ”I rejected. Perhaps in vain, but each of us has its own quirks. :) how the improvement of the past browser engine was discontinued. I didn’t need access to RSS every hour, but somehow I didn’t want to keep several hundred megabytes in the background. Given that without that I always keep open with a dozen tabs. In addition, I'm still not a supporter of simultaneously sitting in several browsers, so the “12th Opera” scheme for light sites, something “chrome-like” for social networks, videos and so on. “Ballast” ”I rejected. Perhaps in vain, but each of us has its own quirks. :) something “chrome-like” for social programs, videos and so on. “Ballast” ”I rejected. Perhaps in vain, but each of us has its own quirks. :) something “chrome-like” for social programs, videos and so on. “Ballast” ”I rejected. Perhaps in vain, but each of us has its own quirks. :)

Meanwhile, the new "Opera" got rid of the mail client, highlighting it in a separate program. A weighty argument confirming the correctness of my move to a discrete RSS aggregator. Nevertheless, I will not hide, the striking changes in the concept of "Opera" 15.xx have given more than one reason to get upset.

I learned about QuiteRSS by accident. Either while surfing on software sites, or while reading comments on one of these resources, I came across the mention of this reader. I downloaded the portable version 0.11. I tested it and decided to write my review on the project mail, the benefit was our compatriots, Aleksey Khokhryakov and Yegor Shilyaev. At that time, the program satisfied only an unpretentious user, and even compared to the Opera, where there was almost everything in the world ... Ah, this is an excellent label system that could be easily and elegantly adjusted to your tasks without incidentally diving into the sea incoming RSS messages! .. and incomparable. In practice. It was she who kept me at Opera before I migrated to QuiteRSS.

However, and without regard to that glorious Norwegian Internet browser, QuiteRSS is not bad: it is based on the WebKit engine and has a fairly easy interface that can be customized. As well as a portable version for Windows, assembly under Linux, translation into dozens of languages. Links from the news can be viewed in the built-in browser or transferred to the external via RMB, or from the reader "rummaged" into your favorite social networks. The most important thing is that the program is free. Although the feedback from the developers is an occasion to think about a donation for the needs of the project. Why? Next you will understand.

Alexey answered my letter. In QuiteRSS there were no tags (shortcuts), it was impossible with one click LMB to mark the message read. And the appearance of the news column had to be corrected by hiding the extra columns and increasing the width of the others. Compare:And However, soon, after two months, tags appeared ( more precisely, categories; you can create your own, configure icons for them and the colors of marked messages), and a daw for those read. Then I transferred my ribbon tree to this reader. Until about last fall, some specific tapes were clumsily updated in the program. This is not surprising given my appetites. The bottom line is, the whole last year I periodically discussed their brainchild with the developers, making rationalization proposals. Some ideas were rejected, but much more was taken with a pencil. Say, links to media files appeared in the aggregator if the RSS feed contains them. So it became much easier for me to control activity on music portals, in particular on PromoDJ. Earlier, I connected RSS with Soundcloud; in a roundabout way, it’s true, but under time pressure and everyday hustle and bustle it’s still more comfortable to scroll through the headers of a dozen messages rather than crawl to a site and there already view dozens of flash elements (whoever uses it will understand :)). In March 2013, QuiteRSS learned to save pictures from received messages. Then he learnedautomatically filter "correspondence" and assign the indicated labels to those messages that contain the same words . It would seem like a lotion for an amateur, but if one of your threads is often updated and you do not have time to keep track of the necessary news in it, then such filtering will greatly facilitate your work with the program. However, unlike the 12th “Opera” QuiteRSS has not yet mastered the search in the entire tree of tapes.

When updating, the program makes a backup of the database and the config file. If suddenly something goes wrong, you can not worry about the safety of personal RSS-richness. I will not go far for an example. On Friday, I decided to install a fresh 0.15 release, but he stubbornly did not see my tape tree and destroyed the main database. I reported this to the developers, and it turned out that QuiteRSS did not want to process the request for the database file, because the path to the folder contained an apostrophe. Fortunately, the problem was fixed promptly: in the evening of the same day, release 0.15.1 was published; and the accumulation of messages "returned" to the program due to the backup. You can reasonably argue - they say, you must back up yourself "for every fireman." Well, I’ll only answer that for about the past six months, QuiteRSS has not experienced any drops. But it’s worth considering that the reader still did not crawl out onto a “stable” stable release with version 1.xx. Although, starting from 0.15, the interface has changed: the menu bar has given way (in every sense) to the tiny button that is nestled near the tab bar, the main toolbar has also disappeared, because the main icons can also be added to the ribbon bar, and everything else, hot keys are available.


In the near (or not) future, the implementation of synchronization with the "cloud" is planned. First it will be TT-RSS, and then, perhaps, it will come to Feedly. The two- or three-columned appearance will be joined by the display of news in the manner of a newspaper page. Other cosmetic changes are expected, be it news filters or program notifications.

In addition to the site , which briefly talks about the latest releases, and the local forum, QuiteRSS has a cheerful tracker . From it you can find out what bugs are planned to be fixed in the first place, vote for existing proposals to improve the interface or write your own.

Of course, I miss a couple of little things since the time of the 12th Opera. For example, by grouping news based on the date of publication. Something is missing in the functionality of the subject: say, clever work with the cache. Despite the advantages of the WebKit platform, QuiteRSS enthusiastically takes about 300 ± 50 MB of RAM to my tape tree, although it contains three hundred channels with varying degrees of intensity. There are restrictions on RSS. Generally speaking, today not all sites after redesigns, etc. repair work leave RSS feeds, increasingly moving to social networks ... I also dream of the appearance of a universal comprehensive reader: to read PDF, to read news, to make notes regarding those or other messages, add something to the bookmarks, which would then be sent to the server and attached to the "Favorites" of the browser.

Be that as it may, right now we have to be content with what we have. And there are, in my opinion, a lot. QuiteRSS impressively handles the processing and cataloging of my RSS feed. Through a simple download manager, you can download podcasts or files, through a mini-browser - watch news and even surf the sites. Moreover, now the reader supports AdBlock's cleansing of ads. Requests for RSS readers are different for us, along with the consumption of RSS feeds. One is enough 2-5 streams and extensions for the browser, while the other give a motley harvester and so that it does not depend on five thousand constantly updated subscriptions. In the middle is QuiteRSS. Or maybe not in the middle - you know better.