Wizz RSS News Reader

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffSeptember 26, 2007The growing popularity of news feeds has led to an increase in simple news readers, but this freeware Firefox-only add-on is far from the easiest to use. Wizz RSS News Reader's interface is a fairly straightforward array of buttons and links, but adding feeds wasn't as simple as search and click.Even when the program detected feeds on a site, it often failed to correctly add them. Sometimes it failed to load them at all for our testers. The feed search button leads to a compact window that merely lists feed subscriptions. While the process seems easy--drag and drop a feed to your list--it doesn't always pick up the identified feed. Choosing to view the reader as a browser sidebar allows you to see the headlines and view the entire story in a single pane. A button opens another window to view the weather in a user-specified country. Unfortunely, instead of a small display on the toolbar, it opens another full window to view condition details.Wizz RSS News Reader falls far short of the abundance of established news readers that have one-click signup offered for RSS feeds and a more intuitive interface. There is a detailed Help file, but it requires too much time spent reading through it to do what should be a fairly easy process. If you're new to RSS feeds, this isn't the most user-friendly option. If you're looking for an upgrade to your existing feed reader, you'll probably want to give this free Firefox add-on a pass.