Ask HN: Which free RSS reader to recommend to our inexperienced users... on IE?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388347I run www.searchtempest.com, a niche search engine for classifieds sites like craigslist (no affiliation). One of our features is to provide an OPML file of the craigslist RSS results feeds for the user's search from all cities within a specified range.
This can be extremely convenient for people looking for a rare item and willing to travel to get it when it comes up. You can stick it into a folder in your RSS reader, and have your own personalized feed of new results matching your search. However, our user base is representative of the general population. In other words, many of them do not yet use RSS. Some are quite technically savvy, but many are not, and many use IE.
Thus far, we have been recommending Google Reader to those unfamiliar with RSS, for obvious reasons. We've written detailed step-by-step instructions[1] for importing and organizing the feeds in GR.
As you may have heard, Google Reader will be discontinued soon. So we need an alternative. I would love to recommend Newsblur, but the fact is that most of our users won't be willing to explore a paid service, and in almost all cases, the free limit of 10 sites will be exceeded. (Personally I think Newsblur is worth its price many times over, but that's irrelevant.) I would also recommend Feedly in an instant, except... IE. Tried TheOldReader, but found filtering and sorting large numbers of feeds into folders to be quite a pain. Also slow, although that may well be temporary.
So... what do we recommend? Above all, it needs to be simple. If it's a great reader in general, all the better, but the main criterion is that we can get someone from zero to viewing their craigslist results in as few simple steps as possible. And it needs to be free, and needs to work in IE.