I used to think the same way until I considered scalability--I might not always want to use Firebird. Other users on the same machine might not want to use Firebird. I might choose to use some other Free Software browser. If I do, I wouldn't want the rather large dependency of a browser (or browser suite, in the case of Mozilla) for news aggregation. Also, I would still want access to my aggregated feed information, no matter how I choose to read the news. So, this makes me think I do not want the news aggregator to be a part of my browser.
Well, firebird is my browser; it's the only one I use. So for me, having them integrated just makes sense; having a separate news aggregator program would be silly.
