I built a news reader that wants nothing from you : five topics, one window
Every news app I tried in the last few years asks for the same three
things before you see a single headline: an account, an API key, and
eventually a subscription. I got tired of negotiating with software
about reading the news, so I built fralsare-daily Github Link - a
small, open-source desktop app that reads public RSS feeds and stops
asking.
What it is
fralsare-daily is a Tauri 2 desktop app (Windows + Linux) that aggregates
public RSS feeds into five fixed topics:
- Geopolitics & Conflict
- Politics & Governance
- Sports
- Technology & Business
- Viral & Social Issues
Five, not fifty. That's the point: a fixed, small set of shelves you can
clear in ten minutes, instead of a personalized infinite scroll.
Clicking a story opens it in a built-in reader. The whole experience
stays in one window — article body, images, internal links with a back
button — with an "Open in browser" escape hatch one click away. There's
also an images / text-only toggle for slow connections.
Why Tauri 2?
The constraint that shaped the architecture: this is a news reader, not a
browser. It needs to fetch feeds and article HTML from arbitrary domains —
which a plain web frontend can't do (CORS) — but it should weigh what a
desktop utility weighs, not 100+ MB of Chromium.
So the split is:
- Rust backend owns all network I/O: it fetches feeds, parses RSS 2.0 and Atom with a streaming parser (no full DOM build), fetches article pages, and does the first sanitization pass.
- Vanilla TypeScript + Vite frontend renders the UI. No framework — the app is one sidebar, one list, one reader view, and a state machine of about 200 lines.
Result: a ~15–20 MB release binary with CI-built packages for both
platforms.
The part that took the most iteration: sanitization
Rendering third-party HTML inside your app is the security-critical part.
I ended up with defense in depth:
-
Extraction — before anything else, the backend picks the actual
article body (largest
<article>block, then<main>, else the document) so site chrome, nav bars, and "related stories" never enter the reader. -
Rust regex pass — strips script/style/iframe/form and other
executable tags, removes
on*attributes and inline styles, and neutralizesjavascript:URLs. - Frontend DOM pass — a second sanitizer walks the parsed DOM and removes the same tag/attribute classes, because regex alone is not a parser and I don't trust one layer.
- Navigation guard — the Tauri webview blocks any navigation away from the app shell; a link inside an article either pushes the in-app history stack or, if it can't be rendered safely, falls back to the system browser.
Images only render after the backend checks the response's magic bytes
(actual JPEG/PNG/GIF/WEBP), which avoids the classic "HTML file with an
image content type" trap.
What I'd do differently
- A real HTML parser (html5ever) in the backend would replace the regex layer — I traded robustness for a lighter dependency tree, but that's a defensible trade I might revisit.
- Feed selection is currently fixed per topic. Custom feeds are the obvious next feature.
Try it
It's MIT-licensed and the source is small enough to read in an afternoon : Repo URL
Prebuilt Windows and Linux binaries are on the releases page,
or cargo tauri dev if you'd rather build it.
If you've been looking for a reason to move off the infinite scroll, this
is my attempt at the reason: fewer topics, no account, no keys, no
tracking, one window.
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fralsare-daily v0.1.0 - released - Linux appimage and windows setup available now - github.com/fralsare/fralsare-daily...