QuiteRSS
A clean, up-to-date implementation of an email-style feed reader.
Summary
| Our Score |
Our Score
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| License | Free (Open source) |
| Link | https://quiterss.org/en |
| Open-source and cross-platform; versatile with social sharing and other options, fast starting, quick navigation, portable and installer versions available. | |
| The main toolbar can be customized with a rich selection of elements but the way to reach them is hard to discover. |
Details
QuiteRSS is a relatively new, open-source, cross-platform RSS/Atom news reader. It has been under active development since 2012. It’s a clean, up-to-date implementation of an email-style feed reader. Both portable and installer versions are available.
With fast starting and quick navigation, QuiteRSS is versatile and offers a full set of options, using a classic three-panel layout (feeds/folders, a list of posts and an embedded browser).
It is hard to discover some of the QuiteRSS options. For example, it is not obvious how to show/hide the legacy “Menu” bar (File, View, Feeds, News… and Help items).
Menu bar hint: click the tiny icon at the left end of the tabs bar to see and select the “Show Menu Bar” option. Click the “File” menu item in the legacy Menu bar to see and uncheck (hide) the “Show Menu Bar” option.
QuiteRSS has a rich set of social sharing options (Email, Twitter, Facebook, Pocket, etc.). It is not easy to discover them. [Hint: show and right-click the Main Toolbar > chose customize > click add > scroll down to the one(s) you want.] You can also set keyboard shortcuts for them via the options dialog box.
In spite of customizing challenges, QuiteRSS should be easy for most neophyte users to start using it. Moreover, it offers help via the users forum.
QuiteRSS has some nice security functions: I spotted AdBlock, Click to Flash (block flash until clicked), and the option to disable Javascript.
While fully featured, some things are quite lacking. Whether it is my setup I don’t know, but QuiteRSS isn’t that stable.
My instance has a folder in folder structure and in there are almost 200 regular RSS feeds and about 80 Youtube feeds. But sometimes when flipping through feeds, it just freezes for a bit and then terminates itself. While I may (or may not) have many feeds configured, my desktop computer with a fast SSD, Windows 10 and 16 GByte of RAM should be more than capable enough to handle this. The same instability problem occurs on my other desktop with even stronger CPU, 16 GByte of RAM and the same model of fast SSD.
Which leads me to backups. While there is an option to export your setup, there is no import. Yes, there is .opml file import, so it is easy to keep/transfer your feeds list, but this software also allows you to adjust many settings like colors. You can adjust these colors to turn it into a dark mode application. This can be exported, but not imported. As a result, you need to adjust a lot of colors when the configuration is lost.
And that happens about once every 30 unexpected terminations. Likely it is solved by copying a file back into the tree structure of QuiteRSS, but if the creators could be bothered to make an export, it would have been nice to have an import too.
My final complaint about the software is the default ordering column. By default it is set to the column ‘Received’. This is not desirable, as there is also a column ‘Published’. Again, after restarting QuiteRSS after an unexpected termination the column is set back to the default and I really want to receive feed entries as they are published, not when I receive them. Now this wouldn’t be such a problem if the software wouldn’t crash at least once every two days.
But it does, so it is. And yet, with all the troubles QuiteRSS gives me, it still trumps RSSOwl. This one is more stable than QuiteRSS with a low amount of feeds, but becomes way worse when handling half the amount of feeds I’m subscribed to.
And to QuiteRSS’s benefit, it is available for Windows and Linux. And I do have a Linux laptop. But its specifications are quite low. Linux runs great on it, but QuiteRSS is “heavy”, because of the amount of feeds.