RSS Feeds in Opera

For whatever reason, sticking with the Opera browser has been difficult. But they just keep adding features which make me want to try harder. How they handle RSS feeds is another nice feature for the list. Hopefully other browser vendors will steal the idea to keep the competition going…and I wouldn't be opposed to an enhancement or two.

RSS in Other Browsers

Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) provide decent RSS viewers. Both display the feeds vertically, similar to a blog (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. RSS in IE and Firefox

IE also has an option to filter entries by category (see Figure 2) as long as the <category> tag is used within the feed.

Figure 2. Filter by Category

And then there's Chrome which only displays the plain XML code (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. XML Code in Chrome

Opera's RSS Viewer

Opera (version 11.64), on the other hand, splits RSS feeds into a grid. The setup is similar to a newspaper where entries appear in their own column. If the browser window is wide enough, multiple entries form a row (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. RSS in Opera

Conclusion

Now I know that isn't exactly ground breaking; it's a good start though. And if any browser manufacturers just happen to be reading, it would be handy if this grid approach was expanded so all RSS feeds being subscribed to can be seen at one time. If I follow a bunch web development feeds, for example, it doesn't matter which website the entries are from. All of them should be grouped together with the newest entries appearing first.