Brave News: Brave desktop users get custom RSS feeds support

Users of the Brave desktop web browser who use Brave News, a service that displays news from various online sources on the browser's new tab page, may now add custom RSS feeds as sources.

Introduced in 2021 on Brave for iOS, support for custom RSS feeds was a much requested feature. It allows users of the browser to add any RSS feed to the news listing that is displayed on the new tab page.

Up until now, users of the desktop version of Brave could only select news sources that Brave added to the News feature of the browser. Called Brave Today initially, the feature is now known as Brave News.

Brave users may scroll down on the browser's new tab page on desktop machines to get to the section. Users can customize the listing with a click on the customize button on the page.

Brave displays a list of categories, Business, Top News, Food and so on, and the preselected sources that users may enable or disable individually. One shortcoming up until now was that there was no option to add other sources to the listing.

Brave 1.36.109, released on March 2, 2022, adds support for the missing feature. To add a custom RSS feed to Brave, select customize while on the new tab page and enter/paste the address into the Feed URL field at the top. Select "add source" once you are done to add the feed to Brave. The feed is added to the news listing from that moment on.

One difference between custom feeds and the list of preselected feeds is that custom feeds lack images, even if they may have them. You only get the title, name of the publication and when it was posted.

Brave users who want to display news from custom sources only can do so, but they need to disable each preset source individually, as there is no option to unsubscribe from them all using a button or switch in the interface. An option to import an OPML file, a file that has data on multiple feeds, usually exported from feed readers, might also be appreciated by users. For now, each feed needs to be added individually.

Closing Words

Support for custom news is coming to Brave for Android as well in the future. Brave desktop users may use the new feature to customize the news listing on the browser's new tab page.

Most Internet users who rely on RSS feeds for their news reading may use dedicated RSS feed readers, as these provide better functionality. Mainstream users may like the integration of news feeds in their browsers though. Note that Brave displays ads as part of the news feed.

Now You: how do you keep yourself informed?

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