RSS Part 15: Client Reflections

In the feature reflections blog post, I discussed the various features and issues of the RSS clients that I have tried out so far, expanding on my client requirements. I would now like to focus on the clients themselves.

GUI Clients

In my client requirements, I stated that I prefer using a native GUI application, for efficiency in processing feeds. I tried out other types of applications as well, and the GUI applications were indeed the most efficient for me.

I have been using Thunderbird for about five years, so I am used to it. Trying out other RSS clients allowed me to see what Thunderbird does well as well as what I am missing. When used as I described, Thunderbird provides great efficiency. Checking feeds in Thunderbird is faster than with any other client that I tried! From an efficiency perspective of processing feeds, the only feature that I miss in Thunderbird is the ability to process all the feeds in a category at the same time, because Thunderbird only shows the items of (direct) child feeds when you select a folder, not the items of descendant feeds.

Trying out other clients highlighted some issues with Thunderbird. In particular, only displaying folders and not displaying feeds is a really poor design. I think that this is done in Thunderbird only because selecting a folder does not show the items of descendant feeds. No other clients have this poor design. Thunderbird is also too strict with feed parsing, as my feed with validation issues works with all of the other (working) clients. Thunderbird also lacks many features that would be nice to have, such as authenticated feeds, scripts, and the ability to easily enable/disable images per feed.

Of the GUI clients that I tried, my favorite is QuiteRSS. It is fast, it provides great hierarchical organization, it supports my preferred workflow with item deletion, and it has many great options. The only issue is that the UI has glitches on my system because it uses Qt. I think I will try switching to it regardless, and I will likely need to get a new computer before too long, after which I hope many issues on my computer will be history.

Liferea is a great option, but it does not support my workflow with item deletion. I had high expectations for Akregator but was disappointed to find that it has many bugs. RSS Guard has poor performance in checking feeds, and the user interface is surprisingly terrible. I am not considering switching to any of these clients.

Web-Based Clients

Though I do not need a web-based client at this time, I tried out some of them to see what they have to offer as well as get an idea of what is available in case I need a web-based client in the future.

If I needed to install a web-based client today, I would select FreshRSS. The performance is good. The resource usage is also good, which would allow me to use it on an existing server instead of having to get a new one. It unfortunately does not support my preferred workflow with item deletion. An even bigger issue is that it interleaves content in the item list, but the items are at least collapsed by default.

Tiny Tiny RSS is not a bad option. It is pretty comparable to FreshRSS, but it interleaves content in the item list in a way that I do not like. It also has the worst configuration for checking feeds of all the clients that I tried out: it encourages frequent checking because it does not support manual checking.

Note that I planned on checking out a non-free, online RSS client that looks quite promising: BazQux. I decided to wait, however, because I currently do not need an online client. If my situation changes and I need an online client in the future, then I would like to be able to do the BazQux trial at that time.

TUI Clients

I am quite happy with using Newsboat to track software releases, where I have relatively few feeds and the feeds have simple content. This was the first time for me to try using Newsboat with my many personal feeds, and I was disappointed to find that it performs quite poorly. It is too slow, it does not have hierarchical organization, it does not support my preferred workflow with item deletion, and you cannot specify titles for feeds.

I was excited to try out GORSS because the screenshot looked interesting, but I had no idea that it is in such an early stage of development. It was unable to load many of my feeds, it is slow, and it has many user interface issues.