Chrome, at least in its experimental Canarian version on Android (and for US users only), is getting one interesting update in the coming weeks brings that back RSS, the once popular format for getting updates from all the websites you love in Google Reader and similar services.
Chrome will soon see a “Follow” feature for websites that support RSS, and a (very) basic RSS reader on the browser’s New Tab page. I think you could almost call it “Google Reader”.
Now this is not about a full-blown RSS reader. The New Tab page shows you updates to the websites you are following in chronological order. However, it doesn’t look like you can easily switch between feeds, for example. It is a start, however.
Credit: Google
“These days, people have many ways to keep up with their favorite websites, including subscribing to mailing lists, notifications, and RSS. It’s a lot for one person to manage, so we’re exploring how to simplify the experience of getting the latest and greatest of your favorite sites right in Chrome, building on the open RSS web standard, ”said Janice Wong, Product Manager at Google Chrome, writes in today’s update. “Our vision is to help people connect directly to their favorite publishers and creators on the Internet.”
A Google spokesperson told me that the company implemented this so that Google would crawl RSS feeds more frequently, “to ensure that Chrome can serve the latest and greatest to users in the following section on the New Tab page.”
RSS was one of the basic technologies of the web 2.0 era. Even today, it’s still the easiest way to get timely updates from your favorite sites (although some may no longer offer feeds) without recommendation algorithms getting in your way. While RSS has always been extremely useful, the user experience has not always been ideal, despite services such as Google Reader (RIP) and Feedly did a lot to make it easy enough subscribing to feeds and getting updates. When Google put Google Reader on the altar of Google+ in 2013, that era came to an end, although die-hard news junkies continued to cling to their Feedly accounts and old copies of NetNewsWire.
I think a lot of people will be happy to see Google bring it back as a core feature of their browser. If you prefer an open web, for all its occasional awkwardness, RSS is the way to go.
For now, however, this is just an experiment. Google wants to get feedback from “publishers, bloggers, developers and citizens of the open web” in order to achieve “deeper engagement between users and web publishers in Chrome”. Hopefully it won’t stay that way.