Wizz RSS News Reader

The 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.