One of the great things about RSS is that you can get a text-only (that is, FAST) summary of a blog without wading through megabits of images and style.

RSS feed readers, for the uninitiated, make it easy to read RSS feeds, those text summaries of blogs, and simplify the task of reaching out and grabbing those text-only (mostly) blog summaries. Using one, it’s short work to review a goodly number of articles quickly.

In my case, the topic is timely: I’ve just updated FireFox to 3.6, and of course that means there’s all sort of plugin conflicts between my current ones and the newest Firefox.

I generally avoid upgrading and/or using a lot of plugins for just that reason (it’s also why I’m reluctant to use a lot of WordPress plugins, except my own, of course). However, one is mandatory – Sage, my trusty RSS reader.

However, in reading up about it, I also noticed a lot of other RSS readers – ones with different styles (in fact, I did a quick search on ‘best firefox rss reader’ and there seems to be a huge amount – although which one is best is inconclusive).

For example, Sage is very simple – click to open a side pane, and then click on feeds to load them in the main one. Very convenient to open/add files.

However, another popular one is News Fox, which open in a tri-pane window – feeds on left, site’s listings on the top right, and articles in the bottom right (much like an email client). It looks interesting…

However, I realize my ideal RSS feeder should:

• Work via FireFox, since I use it so much.
• Allow me to easily add feeds, ideally with a click (like Sage).
• Make it simple to segregate feeds, for when I want to browse feeds on a particular topic.

Not sure if anything like that is out there, or if Sage will do for now. Of course, I’d be willing to try another solution – if the benefits are well worth it. So I’m asking – what RSS feed reader do you use? Why do you like it? And what makes it ‘best of class’ for RSS feed readers (for FireFox or otherwise)?