One surprise package that came with Safari 6 for Lion and Mountain Lion was the loss of the built-in RSS reader. While many Safari RSS users were miffed at Apple for their loss, I wasn’t worried much because I use a one-two punch. Safari Reader, and a dedicated, standalone RSS reader for subscriptions.
Safari Reader is actually quite nice for saving web pages to read later. Even better is the free Safari extension, CustomReader.
Safari Reader gives you controls over the font size and not much else. CustomReader gives you controls over much of Safari Reader’s interface. Change the font, the background color, or create your own customized style sheet to override Apple’s.
CukstomReader’s tools are basic and displayed at the bottom of a Safari Reader page. Click the wrench and screwdriver logo to change CustomReader’s settings.
Select fonts, text color, background color, alignment, even the page width can be adjusted.
Get your geek on in the Advanced tab by inserting your own custom CSS.
The Auto Read function is interesting. Certain sites can trigger custom settings in CustomReader. And, there’s a hotkey combo which tells Safari to open Reader on a particular page.
Safari Reader has a place in your Mac routine by making it easy to grab pages, store them for later reading, and sync them via iCloud to other Macs, iPhone or iPad.
CustomReader just gives you a little more control over the visual aspects of Reader.
I am confused about the title of this piece. It seems to imply Reader is somehow a replacement for RSS when they are features that do completely different things. Yes, prior versions of Safari could render XML feeds cleanly and conveniently but the core purpose of RSS support was subscription and delivery of content. The loss of the RSS feature has completely disrupted my use of Safaris, as over 80% of my bookmarks were RSS feeds.
That said, I love reader and am grateful of the mention of the CustomReader plug-in. It looks like it will be very useful.
I like Reader and use it regularly, but I miss having the RSS reader in Safari. At a base level they provide similar functionality. A way to save web pages you want to read later.
Obviously, Apple thinks Reader is easier for Safari users than the old RSS reader implementation. If you need more, there are a dozen RSS apps available.