What Burbl can do
Your own news feed from open RSS sources you pick – in chronological order, with no algorithm and nothing built to keep you scrolling. No account, no cookies. Everything stays in your browser.
Burbl is a free, privacy-friendly RSS reader that runs in your browser. Follow RSS and Atom feeds, websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, Mastodon, Bluesky and Lemmy side by side, bring your subscriptions over with OPML, and keep reading offline – without signing up for anything.
Getting started
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News from your country
On first start Burbl suggests working news sources for your country, checked live before you add them.
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Starter packs
Ready-made, pre-categorised source sets to begin with in one tap. Hungarian packs show up when your browser speaks Hungarian or you pick Hungary for country news; otherwise they wait under Other languages.
First start, or Manage sources → Starter packs
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Add any source
Type a site address, a bare domain (e.g.
bbc.com) or a feed URL – Burbl finds the feed and shows a test result before you add it. Besides news sites you can follow YouTube channels and playlists, Lemmy communities (!community@instance), Mastodon accounts (@user@instance) and hashtags, Bluesky profiles, Hacker News, blogs, podcasts, weather alerts and exchange rates – and Reddit (r/oru/) until it ends its feeds on 13 November 2026.Manage sources → Add a source
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Burbl news
What’s new in Burbl arrives in your feed as articles, with dates. Mute or remove it like any source.
First start, or Manage sources → Starter packs
Reading
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Search your articles
The search icon finds any article stored in this browser by its title, summary or full text, saved ones too. Accents and case don't matter, and results appear as you type, title matches first. Nothing leaves your device.
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One chronological feed
All your sources in one infinitely scrolling list, newest first. New articles never push the list around: a “new articles” button appears instead, and one tap takes you to them.
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Filters
Show one category, or a single source. Tap a category chip or a source name on any card.
Left sidebar on wide screens, the filter bar on phones
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Topics
Save a search as a topic and pick it like any other filter: it shows the matching articles of all your active sources, newest first. Commas separate alternatives, such as “climate change, global warming”. Topics look at the titles and summaries of the articles stored in this browser, and travel with the settings backup.
Sources → Your topics; the topic filters follow the categories, marked with a magnifier
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Article view
What the feed provides – title, summary, image, body – always with a prominent link to the original article. Videos play only when you tap them.
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Reactions
👍 ❤️ 😂 😮 😢 on every article, anonymous and without an account.
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Share
Shares the original article’s link, so the recipient sees the real source.
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Save for later
Save any article and find it under Saved, newest saved first, until you remove it. Saved articles stay even when they get old or their source is removed, up to 500 of them, and only in this browser.
Save on a card or in the article view; Saved after All, above the categories, once something is saved
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AI tools Beta
Fact check, summarise or translate an article into your language: each link opens the article’s title and link in the AI service you choose. Google Fact Check Explorer offers the fact check only. Optional; turn it off to hide the links. AI can be wrong – check the sources it cites.
Settings → AI tools
Dashboard
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All sources at a glance
A grid with one tile per source showing its latest headlines, plus a clock and the weather.
The dashboard button in the top bar
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Your order
Drag a tile by its handle, or focus the handle and press Alt + arrow keys.
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Hide tiles
Take any tile off the dashboard, the weather too, with the eye button. A hidden source keeps refreshing and stays in your feed.
Hidden tiles, below the grid, puts them back in their old place
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Weather
Now, the next 12 hours and the next days for your area or up to 5 saved places – search a city or enter coordinates. Data from MET Norway.
Sources
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Snooze or mute
Too much from one source? Snooze it for a while or mute it until you turn it back on – from the menu on its cards.
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Categories
Assign categories per source and create your own.
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Unavailable sources
Sources that can’t be reached are listed separately, so a broken feed never goes unnoticed.
Right sidebar on wide screens
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Ended feeds
A feed that is gone for good (like Reddit’s) is marked as ended instead of failing on every refresh. Burbl stops fetching it and keeps its articles; Retry checks it once more, Remove deletes it.
Make it yours
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Theme and colour profiles
Light, dark or system, and six colour profiles, each with a light and a dark variant.
Settings → Appearance
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Text size
Small, Default or Large across the whole app, on top of your browser's own font size.
Settings → Appearance
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Snap scrolling
When scrolling stops, the nearest card or dashboard row lines up below the top bar.
Settings → Appearance
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Compact view
The feed and Saved as short rows with a thumbnail, title, source and time, so many more articles fit on the screen. A row's menu has the original link, share, save and snooze.
Settings → Appearance
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Dot on new articles
In the main feed, a dot marks articles you haven't seen yet. It goes after about three seconds on screen, or when you open the article.
Main feed
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20 languages
Detected from your browser, changeable any time; right-to-left layout for Arabic.
Settings → Language
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Automatic refresh
From every minute to every hour, or only when opened.
Settings → Refresh
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Badges
Off by default. Switched on, you earn bronze, silver and gold badges from your sources (countries, languages, topics, a balanced mix) and your reading (fact checks, reactions, a few hidden ones). Progress is counted in this browser only and never sent anywhere; an earned tier is never taken away. An earned badge can be shared as a square image showing only its name, tier and “via Burbl”. On wide screens, a box in the right column shows how many you have earned and the latest one.
Settings → Badges
Notifications
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New articles
One notification per refresh with the number of new articles and the sources they came from. Turning it on switches every source on; switch single sources off under Manage sources or from their ⋯ menu.
Settings → Notifications
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New version
A notification when a new version of Burbl is ready. It installs itself when Burbl starts; if Burbl is already open, reload to get it.
Settings → Notifications
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Sound or silent
Notifications use your system sound, or none with “Without sound”.
Settings → Notifications
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The limits, and why
Notifications come from Burbl itself, not from a server: no server knows your sources – by design, your data stays in your browser – so nothing can wake Burbl up or push to it. That means:
- They arrive only while Burbl is open in a tab or as an installed app, and only while its page is in the background or its window is behind another one; when you are looking at it, the “new articles” button is enough.
- Nothing arrives while the browser is closed.
- On iPhone and iPad, only when Burbl is added to the Home Screen: iOS allows web notifications only for installed web apps.
- In a background tab the browser may check less often (timers run about once a minute or slower, and some browsers pause background tabs to save battery), so a notification can arrive later than the article.
- With automatic refresh set to “Only when opened”, Burbl does not check in the background, so no article notifications arrive.
- Focus or Do Not Disturb modes and the browser’s site settings can hide them.
Your data
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Backup and move (OPML)
Export your source list – optionally with your settings and weather places – and import it on another device or from another RSS reader.
Settings → Save and load sources (OPML)
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Stays on your device
Sources and articles live only in this browser. Settings shows how much space they use and deletes everything in one tap.
Settings → Data
Install
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Like an app
Burbl opens from its own icon and window and works offline. On iPhone or iPad: tap Share, then “Add to Home Screen”.
Settings → Install app
Privacy promises
- No account, no cookies.
- No algorithm: the feed is chronological.
- Your sources and articles never leave your browser.
- Feeds are fetched directly; a proxy is used only for sites that block browsers, and it keeps no request logs.
- Anonymous visit counts without cookies, which you can turn off in Settings. The public numbers are estimates that also count readers who turned them off – see Burbl around the world.