Feedinvader is an interesting Firefox plugin that combines an online feed reader with a news ticker right underneath your bookmarks bar. The feed reader in the back-end is currently mostly for managing the feeds in the ticker, but with a bit of additional work, it could also become a great reader in its own right.
The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story’s excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.
Nice Ticker – But Feed Reader Needs Work
Feedinvader’s feed reader itself is also worth a look, too, though in its current iteration, it is held back by a few missing features. By default, Feedinvader uses a standard, email client-like, three-pane view, with a color scheme that is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft Outlook. You can also switch to an ‘expanded’ view that shows the full content of a feed without a separate pane for the headlines, but one feature we really missed in Feedinvader was a river of news-style view. What’s far worse, though, is that you can’t mark a story as read, and hence you also can’t see how many unread items you have in any given feed or folder, making Feedinvader almost completely useless as a stand-alone feed reader.
On the positive side, the RSS reader does allow users to import and export OPML files and even import Live Bookmarks from Firefox.
If you like the ticker feature, then the feed reader definitely makes for a good way to manage these feeds, but we wouldn’t recommend you ditch your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader, FeedDemon, or NetNewsWire for it.
As of now, because feeds aren’t marked as read (at least as far as we can see), the ticker will loop from feed to feed, instead of listing stories in chronological order, making it best for small, high-value collections of feeds instead of a way of keeping an eye on a large collection of sources. Because of this, we would rather recommend you use a program like Snackr if you are looking for a news ticker.
Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for alerting us to Feedinvader.
