When Firefox released their Quantum engine, they jettisoned a huge number of plugins. My preferred feed reader was one of those plugins. Faced with the loss of the best way to follow my favorite writers, and presented with the opportunity to try out Firefox’s WebExtensions support, I had no choice choice but to write Brook.

Why Bother?

For many, the demise of Google Reader was synonymous with the death of feeds. If you look though, the feeds are still out there letting us know when new content spills out onto the web. What I have found lacking though, is a simple reader that lets me read in my browser where I read everything else.

Principles

Brook gets out of your way and blends in. To this end, there are no settings, and nothing to configure besides subscribing to the feeds you care about.

There’s also no third party services, sharing, or communities, just a list of sites that have updates, and links to their articles. Brook does one thing well, and leaves the rest to other tools.

What’s Next?

For my purposes, Brook is pretty solid, but there’s always more to do. I’d like to explore how to make Brook blend in even more. I’d also like to explore better feed detection, and possibly alternatives like scraping when feeds aren’t available. Finally, I’m curious how I can provide an excellent experience in Chrome and perhaps Edge.

Brook is open source. If you are interested in helping out, I would love feedback, bugs, and code.

Enjoy!