People kept telling us the same thing. They installed the extension, clicked the toolbar icon, got a popup with their unread articles in it, and then went looking for somewhere to read them. There wasn't anywhere. The popup was for glancing, and reading meant a trip to the website.
So the extension now has a reader: a whole page in its own tab, with your collections and feeds down the left, the article list in the middle and the article itself on the right.
Opening it
There are three ways: the Open Reader button at the top of the popup, right-clicking the toolbar icon, or Alt+Shift+R from anywhere. Clicking an article in the popup also opens it in the reader instead of sending you out to the publisher's site.
It fetches articles in your own browser
Most feeds send a summary and a link. To show you the whole article, a hosted reader has to fetch the page from its own servers, and a great many sites decline. Consent walls, bot checks and "subscribers only" pages all answer a datacentre differently from a person.
The extension runs in your browser, with your cookies and your address, so it asks the site for the page the same way opening a tab would. That makes two things possible that weren't before:
- Sites that block servers read normally, because nothing about the request looks like a server.
- Publications you subscribe to read normally too. If you're signed in to a paper in that browser, the reader gets the article you're already paying for. Your own subscription does the work; we aren't bypassing anything.
Whatever it fetches goes back to your account, so the same article is waiting on feedbro.com and on your phone, even though only one browser fetched it.
Feeds nothing else can reach
The same approach works for whole feeds. An intranet address, a feed behind your company VPN or a feed that only answers a signed-in browser can't be followed by a hosted reader, because no server can see it. Your browser can see it.
Paste the address into the reader's sidebar. If our server can't fetch it, your browser fetches the whole feed and hands it over, and the feed is then marked as this browser's to keep updated. Its articles live on your account like any others, readable on the website and on your phone even though neither could have fetched them.
This is off until you turn it on. It needs permission to read pages in that browser, and it asks for that from a button the first time it's needed, never at install.
Reading, arranged your way
- Three list layouts. Normal, compact headlines for skimming a busy morning, or cards with pictures.
- Four themes. Match your device, light, dark or sepia.
- When an article counts as read. When you open it, when you scroll past it in the list, or only when you say so.
- How far back the list goes. Everything, or the last day, week or month. The unread counts follow the same window, so a feed never claims more than the list can show.
- Keyboard shortcuts. j and k to move, Enter to open, s to save, l to keep for later, u to mark unread, / to search. The same keys work on feedbro.com.
All of these settings live on your account rather than in one browser, so setting the list to Compact on the website opens the extension's reader compact, and the other way round.
Feeds and collections in the sidebar
Your collections are there (the same ones as on the website, since they belong to your account), and picking one filters the list the same way picking a feed does. You can make new ones from the reader.
Each feed has its own settings behind the gear beside it: give it a name of your own, ask for it to be checked more often, or cap how many of its articles you see when it floods everything else. Those settings are yours alone. A feed is shared by everyone following it, so your name for it and your cap change nothing for anybody else.
What has not changed
The popup is still there and still does what it did: follow the site you're on, save a page, glance at what's unread. Rules and alerts are still set up on feedbro.com and still apply everywhere. Your account is still the record of what you've read, and the reader is a better window onto it rather than a separate copy.
Getting it
The extension is on the Chrome Web Store and in Firefox Add-ons. Install it, connect your account in a click, and press Alt+Shift+R.
If something in the reader doesn't do what you expect, tell us. The flag in the reading panel reports an article, and the contact page reaches us for everything else.
