Livre d'Or

That's true, there's a range of desktop programs you can use, whether specialist tools or functionality within things like browsers, mailers, OSes etc. The reason people want to use online tools is because they want to be able to synch their reading between different devices, home computer, work computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone etc. That's honestly not such a big deal for me; the kind of reading I use an RSS reader for is something I mostly do from my own home computer.

I'm a bit scared by your observation that serious tech companies are pulling out of RSS. I hope the reason isn't that there's more money to be made in popularity driven stuff. At least RSS is an open standard, so hopefully hobbyist readers will continue to be around even if the big guys stop supporting it.