… or feed readers, whatever.

I’m currently using Liferea, and I’ve previously been using Straw for a long time.

While both are okay, I consider liferea a bit more polished than straw (and it definitely has some functions like Extensions (aka filters) I really like. For example Heise only has a rather crippled feed (which doesn’t even contain the teaser part of the article), so I grab the front page and convert it to a feed myself. And liferea allows you to group feeds together into one folder and read them like they were one feed. Very nice if you have a couple of comic strips which are each updated once a day, saves a couple of clicks.

Straw also didn’t have proper threading IMHO, so every now and then it was unresponsive while updating the feeds, especially at startup.

However, straw at least did some caching of “attachments”, which is very nice when you’re using it to e.g. read some comic strips via RSS. Liferea doesn’t cache any images, and this totally sucks. For example the Technorati icon it has for each entry is loaded again and again (or at least it always takes a second to be drawn… Oh, and depending on the rendering engine you use in liferea (gtkhtml or mozilla, I’d recommend the first) some keys may or may not function.

Oh, and please don’t suggest I try “blam”. From what I’ve read it’s rather minimalistic so far, and I don’t like C#/Mono stuff.