I’m using thunderbird as feedreader for a long time. I’m only reading few rss feed and so it was was the right choice for me. There’s only one thing missing – watching flash videos within thunderbird. One always have to open the browser to do that.
But with thunderd 3 things have changed. You are now able to enable plugins.
choose Tools – Options – Advanced – General – Config Editor
set mailnews.message_display.allow.plugins to true