October 28, 2004
@ 06:00 PM

Most people looking for a free RSS reader on Windows tend to gravitate towards SharpReader since it is the most popular one on Windows and the first they hear about. Recently I've begin to see more posts from people who've grown tired of its limited feature set and plain user interface that have switched to RSS Bandit.

In his post Vote With Your Download Dave writes

For the longest time I’ve used Sharpreader as my RSS reader. I had had some problems about which I contacted the SharpReader people. I think I sent two e-mails but never got a response. So I started looking.

I found RSS Bandit and I’m all about it now. I like the interface a little better and it’s got lots of nifty features that SharpReader doesn’t. (screenshots are here). So since both of these are free, and RSS Bandit is Open Source even, I can Vote with my download.

In his post RssBandit is awesome!  Imran Koradia writes

I've been using SharpReader for a while since that's the first one that turned up in google's search results on searching for an rss reader :) ! And considering I'm really lazy switching utility software even when it would seem the most logical thing to do, I've stayed on SharpReader for a while until yesterday. I finally switched to RssBandit. Not that SharpReader is bad, but RssBandit is more feature rich and looks way cooler than SharpReader :) I love the tabs that they've got since IE doesn't have them (which is the only reason why I switched to Netscape - I have no problems with IE as such otherwise..). Ofcourse, I could also use the local MSDN help to browse with multiple tabs but that somehow doesn't seem like a good idea to me..

We will be adding a lot more features and eye candy in the next release. There are one or two things SharpReader does that RSS Bandit doesn't such as the ability to delete posts which I'll be adding to RSS Bandit this weekend.  If you liked the last release then the next one will rock your world. I can't wait. ;) 


 

Thursday, October 28, 2004 6:55:28 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I've been running a pre-release of the next version in debug mode and it never hangs like the previous version did for me. It's much faster and looks a lot better. Great work!
Thursday, October 28, 2004 8:21:10 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I really like RSS Bandit, Sharpreader and Sauce Reader. In terms of actual end user functions, I'd rank them Sauce, Sharp, Bandit. Sorry Dare.
Friday, October 29, 2004 6:48:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
The "Delete" feature is the only thing that's keeping me from giving RSS Bandit a real evaluation.
Saturday, October 30, 2004 12:22:30 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare, I've come from running SharpReader to running both Bandit and SharpReader. The only thing that keeps SharpReader on my system is that IMO it's far easier to control via the keyboard -- I can just [Ctrl-DownArrow] through the list of unread articles. RSS Bandit only supports [Space] which is less convenient because the embedded IE control also uses it to scroll and sometimes you lose focus (and incidentally, tabbing *out* of that IE control is hell).

Fingers crossed, customizable keyboard shortcuts will get me onto RSS Bandit 100% of the time.
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