Msfeedicon

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on February 27, 2009

If you cant get through the day without checking your RSS feed subscriptions, you'll be glad to know about Msfeedicon: It perks up and simplifies Internet Explorer's RSS feature by adding some functionality. There's one caveat: The tagging feature described by the publisher didn't work in our tests.

After installation and a reboot, this little IE add-on dropped an RSS icon in our system tray. When we held the cursor over the icon, a small alert popped up with the number of unread posts in the updated feeds. Although Msfeedicon is tied to IE, clicking the icon opened our default browser instead of IE. The publisher updates this utility frequently, so we wouldn't be surprised if an upcoming version addresses that issue so you can configure Msfeedicon to open IE despite your default browser setting.

An alert popped up when feeds were updated. Although the publisher describes a Tags feature that will pick up feeds on related topics, we weren't able to make this feature work during our tests. Still, the ease of use and its space-saving component (no more keeping Favorites Center open to be alerted to updates) make this a recommended tool for RSS-feed devotees.