Looking for an easy way to keep on top of our unread articles on Feedly on Chrome?
Feedly Notifier is a small Chrome extension that lets you do exactly that.
While Feedly Notifier isn’t the only Google Chrome Feedly extension available on the Web Store it is one of the simplest to use, and one of the few to still receive updates and development.
For comparison, the oft-recommended (and very cool) Feedly Checker hasn’t been updated since 2013.
Feedly Notifier: Features
An open-source add-on, Feedly Notifier does what it says: it notifies you about new articles in your Feedly subscriptions.
The “main” feature of Feedly Notifier is the unread count that sits in the toolbar.
This omni-present counter is updated at a set (configurable) interval to relay passive information about how many unread new articles are waiting for you while you’re busy browsing elsewhere.
Clicking on the toolbar button will, by default, open a small pop-up window. This shows you the 20 most recent unread articles and offers buttons for opening all unread articles in new tabs, marking all items as read, and manually refreshing the list.
You can also preview articles in the pop-up window by clicking the small arrow icon beside each post.
Clicking on an article title will open the article source in a new tab (i.e., it doesn’t open the article’s page in Feedly).
The embedded article window that opens when you click on the toolbar counter won’t be to everyone’s taste. Thankfully you can set it to open the Feedly website in a new tab instead. Right-click on the toolbar icon and select “options” to change this, and plenty of other, settings.
Other settings include only being notified/seeing articles from a specific Feedly category or folder and saving items to ‘read later’.
The extension can also be made to serve up desktop notifications of new posts as Feedly finds them (for added effect you can also enable sound notifications on new articles, too).
Feedly Notifier Features at-a-glance:
- Unread article count in toolbar
- Pop-up window with unread headlines
- In-window article previews
- Filter news by category
- Mark items as read from the pop-up window
Drawbacks
There are a few drawbacks.
For one, whether you set the app to show the pop window or not, it runs all the time in the background. This isn’t necessary. Our own OMG! Chrome! notifier extension checks for new articles periodically, but only ‘runs’ when you click on its toolbar button.
A similar option could be used here, albeit at the expense of desktop notifications (which Chrome is doing away with).
Although not the biggest user of memory, the add-on sits on around 60MB RAM while Chrome is running (if you have other extensions, this can add up, particularly on Chromebooks with 2GB RAM).
Finally, a matter of taste, more efficient use of space/the layout of headlines in the pop-up window could be improved. Things look a little squashed and the use of bold icons and bold headlines limits legibility a little.
Install Feedly Notifier for Google Chrome
Feedly Notifier is a free extension available for Chrome and Chrome OS. You can install it from the Chrome Web Store.
Permissions wise the add-on will ask for access to Feedly sites (understandable, as it needs to communicate with Feedly APIs), permission to show desktop notifications (these can be disabled, however) and access to read your entire browsing history. It’s not clear exactly why the add-on needs this latter capability.