I won’t argue on which version, be it standalone or web based is faster at feed refreshing since that’s beyond my knowledge.

The only thing I’d say to that though is… tradeoffs.

I mean, I work from home and am on some sort of device all day. Be it a PC or my iPhone. I’m not saying that refreshing an RSS feed every minute or what have you isn’t essential, but is there a huge difference between one and 5 minutes? If something’s so urgent, there are other methods to get that info almost instantaneously like push/email alerts via an app either on one’s phone or PC that are probably better suited for those types of scenarios.

The flexibility that this or I guess any other web based service allows for things like sharing, synchronizing, saving etc in my opinion are worth the possible 4 or 5 minute delay as opposed to a stand alone solution.

For example, the wife and I do retail and wholesale arbitrage. While I do have some RSS feeds for deal sites, I use other methods like push and email alerts and other bot-like solutions to get notified of price drops and or sales/liquidations. I would not rely or even expect RSS to be able to keep up with that constant change.

Someone mentioned Smart RSS earlier. I remember GHacks reviewing this program a few months ago. Funny enough, I came across the review via my feed entry on The Old Reader. Looks like the commenters weren’t overly impressed by it. https://www.ghacks.net/2020/03/10/smart-rss-reader-is-a-feed-reader-extension-for-firefox-and-chrome/

And to reiterate one of the original points, The Old Reader is completely screen reader accessible.

Cristóbal