Earlier this year I switched from NewzCrawler to SharpReader for keeping track of all of the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. The past couple weeks, though, I gave up on SharpReader as well and switched to Google’s latest version of its still-in-beta Google Reader.
I used Bloglines for a week a couple years ago and the experience was so poor that I swore off browser-based readers altogether. Google, though, gets it right.
I tend to have hundreds of feeds and 30,000-40,000 unread stories at any time in my reader. This is a huge problem for the desktop-based readers as they start to use lots of memory. SharpReader was sucking up 400mb of memory while running. And, although I haven’t used it in awhile, Bloglines apparently still has a ridiculous 200 items per feed limit, so after a feed has 200 unread items, no new items are added.
Google Reader doesn’t have that limitation, and it is very nice to offload the huge volume of feeds and items to Google’s hardware and just run the browser, not to mention the capability of accessing the reader from any web browser.
And, of course, it’s free. I’m sold.