News Sifter for Windows

Sift through this program's features and performance and you'll find more rocks than gold. News Sifter's plain-Jane interface apes the format used by many feed readers, without adding design elements for better usability. The promised Help file failed to load during testing. That wasn't the first or last problem with this feed reader.

The program comes with quite a few preloaded feeds, but we encountered error after error when trying to add new ones. Often the program displayed error dialogs. Other times it simply failed to restart. Editing the saved list of feeds failed to restore News Sifter to normal operation. For the lucky few where the application stayed stable, the consensus by our testers was the product is bland, and poorly executed. Feeds are stored in a single ungrouped list. Tabs duplicate methods to browse files. Selecting an article to read often resulted in additional Internet Explorer errors. There was no option to use Firefox as the default reader, even when it was set as the default system browser. We found little evidence of a powerful Artificial Intelligence engine controlling article classification and filtering.

News Sifter is freeware, with very little to recommend it. We found in uncompetitive in this option-filled genre.

Version 1.5.1 build 2424 has fixed bug where Newssifter would crash if a feed was not found. Updated RSS engine to be more compliant.