Brent Simmons has announced the NetNewsWire 2.0 public beta, so now I can talk about this excellent product.

Everyone has their favorite features in NNW2, and I'm no exception.

1. The embedded browser. When Brent first put this in, I ignored it. Once it got tabs, I loved it. I'd say that more than 75% of my web browsing is now done using the embedded browser. It can can open way more tabs than Firefox can, and NNW preserves your tab settings across sessions and (rare crashes). The only thing I miss from Firefox are bookmarklets and ad killing (does PithHelmet work on embedded Webkit browsers?)
2. Brent did a bunch of performance work that really helped my long feed subscription list.
3. Marsedit is a great editor -- it worked out of the box with my Metaweblog support for pyblosxom, although that's probably because Adriaan broke the support in with Ecto. Actually I'm torn on this at the moment, because I finally got around to trying Ecto 2, and it has a lot of the features that were MarsEdit only, particularly multiple posting windows. Ecto 2 also has nice support for del.icio.us.
4. The Dinosaurs and Bandwidth stats windows. Now I can find out who's slacking on their blogs, and which blogs dont' support gzip and 304 handling.

All in all, NNW2 is the only aggregator that I've tried on any platform that fits my style of reading. I've tried Shrook PulpFiction, and NewsFire on the Mac. Bloglines isn't an option for me -- I am disconnected enough that a web app doesn't cut it (although I'd love a way to get those social statistics that Bloglines has). There are still bugs in the beta (I helped report them) but Brent has be really responsive to bugs on the beta list, and I am very confident that the bug count is going to go down. If you're on the Mac and have a heavy feed load, go give it a try.

(As an aside, it's also been interesting to see the difference between NNW's combined view, which creates a Webkit browser instance for every post in the combined view (in my case, that's a lot), compared to FeedDemon, which uses the Windows IE browser component and an XSLT stylesheet. Webkit is doing something right because NNW's combined view works pretty well even with all those instances. Meanwhile, on Julie's Thinkpad, FeedDemon, which uses the IE component, and Outlook, which also uses the component, are constantly locking up, running out of memory etc. )