Sage 1.3.6 - Mozilla Firefox RSS Feed Reader Extension

Sage improves on Mozilla Firefox's live bookmarks with an RSS feed reader extension that adds better organization and much prettier display. It's a pity Sage cannot check feeds for updates on a schedule and notify you of new items. Ways to retain or flag posts would be nice, too.

There is, of course, no limit to the good simplicity can do. If you want headlines from your favorite sites, available upon a mere click in your Mozilla Firefox bookmark toolbar, Live Bookmarks are perfect.

What if you want more than just the headlines, though? If you want to see at a glance what is new? Do you have to turn to another program that, most likely, long has abandoned simplicity and embraced the common babushka of features inside features inside features? Not if you stumble upon Sage first.

In a sidebar panel of the browser window, Sage displays, grouped in folders if you so desire, your subscriptions and, upon a click, their headlines. In addition, and this is what makes Sage so sweet, you get a newspaper-like display of all headlines (including the accompanying stories) in a pretty, useful and customizable manner. The Sage site has a number of styles prêt-à-porter. (Unfortunately, using them is not automatic and requires some saving and copying.)

Sage can pick up existing Mozilla Firefox Live Bookmarks, but it can discover the feeds on any page itself, too, and supports OPML for feed import or export. While Sage does include a handy shortcut to common blog search engines, you cannot search the items of your subscriptions.

For a news reader, it is also a pity that Sage does not check feeds on its own and a schedule, letting you know about anything new discovered. You do have to open Sage and check the feeds manually.