RSS Guard – a simple (yet powerful) RSS/RDF and ATOM feed reader for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X

Supported Operating Systems

The core features of RSS Guard are:

Spoiler: Core Features

(via https://www.neowin.net/news/rss-guard-403/)

• support for online feed synchronization via plugins,
• Tiny Tiny RSS (from RSS Guard 3.0.0).
• multiplatform,
• support for all feed formats,
• simplicity,
• import/export of feeds to/from OPML 2.0,
• downloader with own tab and support for up to 6 parallel downloads,
• message filter with regular expressions,
• feed metadata fetching including icons,
• simple Adblock functionality,
• customized popup notifications,
• Google-based auto-completion for internal web browser location bar,
• ability to cleanup internal message database with various options,
• enhanced feed auto-updating with separate time intervals,
• multiple data backend support,
• SQLite (in-memory DBs too),
• MySQL.
• is able to specify target database by its name (MySQL backend),
• “portable” mode support with clever auto-detection,
• feed categorization,
• drap-n-drop for feed list,
• automatic checking for updates,
• ability to discover existing feeds on websites,
• full support of podcasts (both RSS & ATOM),
• ability to backup/restore database or settings,
• fully-featured recycle bin,
• printing of messages and any web pages,
• can be fully controlled via keyboard,
• feed authentication (Digest-MD5, BASIC, NTLM-2),
• handles tons of messages & feeds,
• sweet look & feel,
• fully adjustable toolbars (changeable buttons and style),
• ability to check for updates on all platforms + self-updating on Windows,
• hideable main menu, toolbars and list headers,
• KFeanza-based default icon theme + ability to create your own icon themes,
• fully skinnable user interface + ability to create your own skins,
• “newspaper” view,
• plenty of skins,
• support for "feed://" URI scheme,
• ability to hide list of feeds/categories,
• open-source development model based on GNU GPL license, version 3,
• tabbed interface,
• integrated web browser with adjustable behavior + external browser support,
• internal web browser mouse gestures support,
• desktop integration via tray icon,
• localizations to some languages,
• Qt library is the only dependency,
• open-source development model and friendly author waiting for your feedback,
• no ads, no hidden costs.

It also supports many online services:

Spoiler: Online Services

• Tiny Tiny RSS,
• Inoreader (via Google Reader API plugin),
• Nextcloud News,
• Gmail,
• FreshRSS (via Google Reader API plugin),
• The Old Reader (via Google Reader API plugin),
• Bazqux (via Google Reader API plugin),
• Reedah (via Google Reader API plugin),
• Feedly.

RSS Guard 4.0.3 (September 24, 2021)
Website (GitHub)
Documentation
Download

Spoiler: Changes v4.0.3

Added:

• Now it is possible to disable hardcoded keyboard shortcuts in feed/article lists so that user-defined single-stroke shortcuts can work properly. (#484)
• Skins were reverted to 4.0.1 as they were very buggy. Previous skins were stable and will be used for time to come. I will make brand new polished skin in some next release which will not replace existing skins but will be added.

Fixed:

• Settings dialog now remembers its size and also adds scrollbars where needed. Also was polished a bit. (#493)
• Icon of "standard RSS/ATOM/..." service/account was updated to be "RSS" icon, not "RSS Guard" icon and also is preselected in "Add account" dialog.
• Updated documentation and translations.
• "Written by" bottom section of article preview now uses same date/time format as article list.
• Code refactored.
• Icons are now properly loaded when fetching list of feeds in Tiny Tiny RSS.
• Inline article searching now uses much smaller delay after typing search phrase.

 

RSS Guard 4.0.4 Released (October 15, 2021)
Website (GitHub)
Documentation
Download

Spoiler: Changes v4.0.4

Added:

• Updated documentation. (#516)
• Sizes of horizontal/vertical width/height of article preview are now kept separately. User can thus have different sizes of article preview in each layout. (#515)
• Added new simplistic skin "nudus". (#512)
• Article filters now can determine "uniqueness" of article according to article's "id". (#509)
• Some columns in article list now also display respective values in tooltips. (#513)
• Columns "read" and "important" in article list are now resizable. (#514)

Fixed:

• Avoid unwanted displays of article previewer. (#507)
• "Automatically expand item when selected" now behaves consistently when launched with keyboard shortcut. (#506)
• Fixed multiple issues regarding article "focus" or "selection".
• Fixed some problems with recognizing filenames when downloading files.
• Fixed crash when repeatedly downloading some files.
• Tweaked some icons.
• Fixed executable bits on some deployed files.
• Updated skin "API".

 

RSS Guard: open source feed reader with optional online feed syncing
January 3, 2022

 

I've been testing using RSS Guard for about two months now. My former reader was Quite RSS, before that RSS Owl. I like RSS Guard so far, the maintainer is also quit helpful.

 

RSS Guard 4.1.0 Released (January 7, 2022)
Website (GitHub)
Download

Spoiler: Changes v4.1.0

4.1.0
Added:

• Network communication of RSS Guard now shares cookies and user-agent with bundled WebEngine. You can thus access cookie-protected resources in RSS Guard, including feeds. (#556)
• Confirmation dialog is displayed when removing article filter. (#562)
• Use "QSoundPlayer" for better support when playing notification sounds, no GStreamer required now. (#551)
• New default skins with light/dark variants, Nudus. Thanks to @akinokonomi for amazing job. Nudus is lightweight skin with maintainable code base. Note all other skins will be removed in next release as it is difficult to provide reasonable support for them. (#540)
• Optionally display only time (without date) for today's articles. (#530)
• Icon size of toolbars is now configurable.
• More web attributes added to web viewer context menu.
• Use more standard user-agent.
• Tens of minor tweaks added.

Fixed:

• Expanding/collapsing of categories is now properly persistent and behaves more correctly when filtering feed list in some way. (#546)
• No more crashing after "mark item as read" action. (#563)
• Deal with spaces in feed URLs. (#542)
• Fix crash in Greader plugin. (#539)
• Fix cleaning up of database when clearing articles older than 0 days.
• Finally solving issues with remembering article list/viewer splitter position. (#517)
• Update some hyperlinks, use correct terminology. (#536, #537)
• Make "article list row height" work as intended. (#528)
• Localizations synced.
• Application now closes correctly on Linux, if tray area is not available and tray icon is mistakenly still "enabled".
• Server JavaScript file of Adblock is now copied to destination properly.
• Regex filtering and "show unread only" features now work together in feed list.
• Node.js "NODE_PATH" value is now determined in runtime, not hardcoded.

RSS Guard 4.1.1 Released (January 7, 2022)

 

RSS Guard 4.1.2 Released (January 10, 2022)
Website (GitHub)
Download

 

Still using RSS Guard. Think I like it. Plan to upgrade soon.

 

RSS Guard 4.2.4 Released (September 5, 2022)
Website (GitHub)
Download (Releases)

Spoiler: Changes v4.2.4

Added:

• Intelligent and network-usage-friendly two-way article synchronization is now supported in TT-RSS plugin too. Note that "api_newsplus" plugin must be installed on your TT-RSS instance. (#339)
• Mac OS X release of RSS Guard now supports "arm64 Apple Silicon" architecture. (#758)
• Google Reader API plugin now supports Miniflux. (#780)
• Full-blown drag/drop feed/category reordering/sorting. Behavior is different depending on whether "alphabetic sorting" is enabled or not. (f63af3a)
• Windows and Linux official packages now use Qt 6.3.1 or newer. Qt 5.15 is still supported, though.

Fixed:

• Handling of CLI parameters was improved in several places throughout the app. This fixes calling external browsers etc. (#748)
• Tray icon sometimes reported wrong number of new/unread articles. (#754)
• App should handle pinned shortcuts on Windows better and allow it to re-open existing main window of running RSS Guard instance. (#773)
• App sometimes generated empty OPML files. (#774)
• Columns in article list were sometimes wrongly reset to default state. (#778)
• Fixed icon validation for Flatpak release. (#782)
• Skin "nudux-*" was improved. (#783)
• Feeds sorting mode/order is now correctly persistent in all cases. (#784)
• Handling of images in non-webengine article viewer is now better. (#785)
• Better MinGW compatibility when compilling RSS Guard.
• Translations synced.
• Updated docs.
• Specific error strings are now propagated to feed's tooltips properly so user can see specific error messages for feeds.
• Article content layout is now greatly improved as content is automagically converted to HTML when displayed.
• Better date/time handling of incoming e-mails in Gmail plugin.

 

How to configure RSS Guard to block all cookies
By Martin Brinkmann - September 6, 2022

 

RSS Guard Portable 4.2.4 (RSS/ATOM feed reader) Released (September 22, 2022) (PortableApps.com)

 

RSS Guard 4.2.5 Released (September 30, 2022)
Website (GitHub)
Download (Releases)

 

RSS Guard Portable 4.2.5 (RSS/ATOM feed reader) Released (October 16, 2022) (PortableApps.com)

 

Just a comment to appreciate this post. I just DL's it, compiled it and installed it, working A-Okay.

 

RSS Guard 4.3.0 Released (January 21, 2023)
Website (GitHub)
Download (GitHub - Releases)

Spoiler: Changes 4.3.0

Added:

• Massive update for feed fetching mechanism. It is now very parallelized and performance gain should be brutal. On my development PC with 4 cores (Intel i5) I observed 800 % performance boost. Note that this feature required huge number of changes on source code so there could be some corner case regressions or not so polished situations. File bug report when that happens. Also, number of threads used by this feature is configurable via --threads command line switch. This parallelization approach will also be applied to some other parts of application in the future, particularly for some massive batched network operations in some plugin - TT-RSS, Greader or Gmail - which will result in massive performance boost too.
• RSS Guard is now available on Flathub in two distinct variants - "full" and "lite" (same as "nonwebengine").
• Suffix ".xml" is also accepted for OPML 2.0 files.
• Brutal speed enhancements when importing OPML 2.0 files. Whole functionality is now properly parallelized and performance boost is potentially massive, depending on number of your CPU cores/threads.
• Qt 6 bumped to 6.4.2 version - this fixes some regressions.

Fixed:

• Some random Mac OS X crash. (#866)

 

RSS Guard update brings massive performance boost
By Martin Brinkmann - January 23, 2023

 

I have noticed a marked increase on feed updates since installing 4.3.0. I have a lot of feeds.

 

RSS Guard 4.3.1 Released (January 25, 2023)
Website (GitHub)
Download (GitHub - Releases)

 

RSS Guard Portable 4.3.1 (RSS/ATOM feed reader) Released (January 31, 2023) (PortableApps.com)

 

RSS Guard 4.3.2 Released (February 3, 2023)
Website (GitHub)
Download (GitHub - Releases)

Spoiler: Changes 4.3.2

4.3.2
Added:

• Display total number of underlying feeds/categories in account's tooltip in feed list. (#881)
• Press "CTRL+F" when article script textbox is highlighted in "Article filters" dialog to allow for text searching. (#889)
• Filtering option in article list toolbar are now inclusive with checkbox like appearance. You can now thus select multiple filtering conditions and if article meets atleast one of them, it is displayed. (#468)
• WebEngine disk cache now can be disabled in settings. If it is "disabled" then RSS Guard will use memory-based cache which is automatically destroyed when RSS Guard exits. (#725)
• Help spoilers now can display HTML help with clickable hyperlinks.
• Skins are now able to load custom TTF and OTF fonts and also skins now are able to specify application-wide font. You can see sample usage of this feature in sample skin.

Fixed:

• Fixed crash when importing OPML files.
• Fixed looooong-standing hidden bug which could cause that labels DEassigned from filters were not synchronized back to feed service if supported.
• Enhanced information about "resources" in "About" dialog.