A while back I mentioned that I had been looking for and found an RSS aggregator (newsreader):

“For about a week now I’ve been hunting for a good RSS aggregator. I really didn’t want a Web-based RSS aggregator because they are usually a pain to manage. I looked hard and heavy and found SharpReader. It’s phenomenal. The power it packs and features it has are incredible.“

I’m not so impressed with SharpReader anymore. A few days ago I went out and nabbed Sauce Reader to see if it would be a better RSS newsreader.

There are two things I’m not too impressed with about these two products, and that is their use of Internet Explorer. Something I’ve loathed for quite some time now is Internet Explorer. Both SharpReader and Sauce Reader come out of the box using IE for your web page viewing needs. In SharpReader you can change the default browser to Firefox, but I always get errors when using Firefox as the default browser. In Sauce Reader I have yet to find an option that allows me to change the default browser.

I understand that there are some programming limitations in the Microsoft environment that force this semi-mandatory use of Internet Explorer to happen, but as soon as a Microsoft-independent RSS aggregator hits the scene, it’s going to flourish. But other than that, both newsreaders are decent products.

SharpReader is a lightweight, fast RSS aggregator that is easy to manage and configure. It calmly notifies you of new information as it comes in and does its job very well. Some of the features of SharpReader are:

• Dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds - just drag a link from your browser into SharpReader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top.
• Feedster integration to easily search weblogs and news sites for specific terms, and even subscribe to such a search to be notified of new results.
• Reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs and gzip/deflate encoding.
• HTTP Authentication support.

SharpReader is definitely a pre-release product, but should develop into a fine RSS aggregator.

Sauce Reader is a robust product that offers more than just RSS-reading capabilities (that I’ll never use). It’s powerful enough to do everything you could possibly want to do with a newsreader. However, there is one thing I’ve noticed about Sauce Reader that is a major turnoff. Sauce Reader uses an inordinate amount of system resources. I have observed 60+ megabytes of RAM being dedicated to just Sauce Reader. This alone, in my opinion, gives SharpReader the edge. But, similar to SharpReader, Sauce Reader is a beta product (just ignore the 1.8 version number). Some of the defining features of Sauce Reader are:

• Clean, intuitive Outlook 2003 style user interface.
• Integrated weblogging environment with full posting functionality.
• Automatic application updates.
• MSN Messenger integration.

Like I mentioned before, Sauce Reader has a lot of features that I will never use. However, some of these features could be very beneficial to some one that reports in their blog on what other blogs or news sources are saying.

So, overall, SharpReader is a better RSS aggregator than Sauce Reader because SharpReader is a newsreader and nothing else, where Sauce Reader is a newsreader as well as a few other things. However, neither product completely satisfies my RSS aggregation needs. Both have their advantages (lightweight vs. all-in-one) but the defining disadvantage to Sauce Reader is its system resource utilization.

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