Aside from these two variants, there is also feed reader functionality available inside other applications such as email programs like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. There are essentially two types of feed readers: desktop applications and web (or browser-based) applications. Alternatively right-clicking (or control-click if you're on a Mac) on the RSS icon or text link, selecting Copy Shortcut (Internet Explorer browser) or Copy Link Location (Mozilla Firefox browser) and then pasting the resulting link directly into a feed reader is another way to subscribe. Although some applications will have an automated process to subscribe to a news feed, the basic way to subscribe is by simply clicking on the RSS icon and/or text link. By adding a feed to a feed reader, a user becomes subscribed to the feed.

In order to take advantage of these feeds, users require either a desktop-based or web-based application called a “feed reader” or “aggregator” that can read these RSS-formatted files.

Websites that have their own RSS feed(s) for notifying users of new syndicated content will usually display a standard icon (in most cases a rounded orange square with white radio waves inside ) and a text link (hyperlink) to their feed's URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a file located on a web server that is written following a particular standard format.

Rss feed is