well i'm not sure i want to comment on this crappy post but here goes.. i use Feed Demon. I wanted something that would run on my desktop independent of browser. I hear the firefox aggregator is pretty good but I switch back and forth between browsers pretty frequently. And since I (my company) paid for the license, it's Feed Demon for me!

I'm a SauceReader fan... it's simple, customizable, and has just the right number of features. As Micki said, I prefer a standlone reader (and besides, Maxthon still kicks Firefox's over-hyped ass :)).

Bloglines. Just because someone recommended it, and it works. I've got no need to try anything else.

Just to throw my own hat in the ring... or whatever.. trust me, there's a common colloquialism in there somewhere...

Anyways, I use Sage, which is neither a web-based or standalone solution, but a firefox extension. It integrates cleanly with the browser and is highly configurable. If I were to switch to a standalone, which is not out of the realm of possibility, it would probably be Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon, probably because it's the only one I ever used and liked. To be fair, though, I haven't looked into aggregators in a year or so and I'm sure there are quite a few more adequate products out there than there were this time last year. Also, FeedDemon is not freeware, so there's that.

Mostly, I stick with Sage and am thrilled to have discovered Furl, which all of this page's links will soon be powered by.

I don't use RSS feed readers. I don't like reading blog posts outside of the context of the blog itself.

Aggregators are okay, but theinteresting links are always things I've already seen. Everybody reads the same shit, and the good stuff always ends up in the same old places anyway (Boing Boing, Meta, etc).

And Brad, I recently dumped Maxthon for Firefox, because Maxthon has some quirks that really cheese me off. With extensions I've managed to tweak Firefox to act almost exactly like Maxthon, minus those problems. You can even use mouse gestures if you like.

I don't use RSS feed readers. I don't like reading blog posts outside of the context of the blog itself. I like to get a sense of who the author is.

Aggregators are okay, but everybody reads the same shit so the good stuff always ends up on the usual suspects (Boingboing, Meta, etc) anyway.

Brad, I dumped Maxthon for Firefox because Maxthon has some really annoying bugs that aren't getting fixed. With extensions, Firefox can act just like Maxthon, including mouse gestures.

It's true that with a handful of tweaks you can get Firefox to behave just like Maxthon, my question is: Why doesn't it behave that way out of the box? Are Super Drag&Go and double clicking on a tab to close it such exotic featuees that I should need several extensions to enable them? Or the ability to drag tabs? These features are bare bones and should be included as preferences in Firefox.

I've read more threads about how to most easily recreate the Maxthon browsing experience in Firefox.. it's insane.

That said, I use Firefox, simply because it's safer and better for development. I can't imagine writing javascript or CSS without Firefox ever again.

I think my next blog may have to be a few of the things I've done to tweak Firefox to my liking...

Sorry for the echo.

I certainly think there are plenty of extensions that should be preferences instead, but I think that's partly the result of the open source development. I expect plenty of those features -- the popular ones -- will become part of the full install in future versions.

Maxthon's developers definitely had foresight when it comes to an excellent browsing experience, but the little bugs that remain kill the thing for me. How hard is it to make sure the focus moves from the address bar to the browser window after I type in a URL and hit enter? I was constantly hitting the down arrow intending to scroll, and instead chose a URL from the address bar history. Drove me nuts. I still like Maxthon, but at this point I've got Firefox to do exactly what I need it to do, minus the little annoyances. So far, anyway. I do miss the Groups menu, though.