Last July I was quite critical of NewsGator Online. I’ve stuck with them as my primary source of feeds because of their acquisition of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

They’ve made some serious improvement over the past few months and while I prefer FeedDemon any day, when I do want to check my feeds from a browser it’s not that bad anymore. 

If you haven’t tried NGOS lately, here’s what you may be missing (note, I’ve only tried this on Mac and Windows Firefox…if it doesn’t work in Safari or IE…what can I say? Oops?)

Ajax, the quicker site cleaner-upper: The top menu is much improved. Simple drop-down menus replace a line of links.

Bloglines, schmoglines: When viewing a feed or folder, you now have a handy toolbar that lets you take action on a feed. Also, like Bloglines you can see how many fellow NG subscribers you have to that blog. ::waving to the other 9 people subscribed to this blog through NG:: 

Folder organization: right-click on a folder and save a trip to the painful-to-use “Organize folders” page.

Also:

• Search for feeds from the NGOS window
• Folders/feeds are drag & drop

Still needs:

• There is still too much scrolling. Would love to see the feed pane scroll down with the content on the right so if I’m at the bottom of reading a long entry and I want to go to a feed in my “Blogs A-J” folder I don’t have to scroll all the way back up to the top
• Keyboard shortcuts would help
• A Firefox extension and/or update to the Bookmarklet so when you’re done adding a feed from the browser you land back where you were reading instead of at your list of feeds
• Customizable fonts. 11px Tahoma on a high resolution monitor is very hard on the eyes

Does it replace FeedDemon? No. Is is it more than passable if I’m not on my own computer? For the first time in a long time I can say…absolutely yes!