Sign in

Private company

RSSOwl

Logo: CPL, via Wikimedia Commons3

Discontinued news aggregator

RSSOwl is a discontinued news aggregator for RSS and Atom news feeds. It is written in Java and built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which uses SWT as a widget toolkit to allow it to fit in with the look and feel of different operating systems while remaining cross-platform. Released under the EPL-1.0 license, RSSOwl is free software.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

See how the biggest companies compare on our leaderboards

RSSOwlscreenshot
Photo: Bruno Pedrozo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons5

RSSOwl is a discontinued news aggregator for RSS and Atom news feeds. It is written in Java and built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which uses SWT as a widget toolkit to allow it to fit in with the look and feel of different operating systems while remaining cross-platform. Released under the EPL-1.0 license, RSSOwl is free software.2

The story

RSSOwl began as small project on SourceForge at the end of July 2003. The first public version was 0.3a.

Version 1.0

RSSOwl 1.0 was released on December 19, 2001. It was released with support for RSS and Atom news feeds. The initial release also supported exporting feeds to PDF, RTF, and HTML. This release was available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris.

RSSOwl 1.1 added support for toolbars and quick search in news feeds. Version 1.2 improved toolbar customization and added support for Atom 1.0 News feeds. Versions 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 added universal binary support for the Mac as well as drag and drop for tabs and a built-in feed validator. RSSOwl was the SourceForge Project of the Month for January 2005.

Version 2.0

RSSOwl 2.0 was announced on March 7, 2007, at EclipseCon 2007. Version 2.0 was rebuilt on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and used db4o for database storage and Lucene for text searching. Several milestone versions were released before the final 2.0 version that added labeling of news feeds, pop-up notification of new feeds and storage of news articles in news bins. The final 2.0 version was released as milestone 9 and added support for secure password and credential storage, news filters, support for embedding Firefox 3.0 XULRunner to render news feeds, and proxy support for Windows. Version 2.1, released July 15, 2011, added Google Reader synchronization support and new layouts.

Forks

RSSOwl is no longer maintained by its original developer. However, a maintained fork of it is available, known as RSSOwlnix.

From Wikipedia’s article on RSSOwl, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5