RSS Subscription Extension for Google Chrome

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 26, 2010
Updated • May 29, 2016
Google Chrome
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Google Chrome, unlike Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer does not offer a quick way to subscribe to RSS feeds with a shortcut.

Both Opera and Firefox display an RSS feed icon in the address bar while Internet Explorer displays an icon in a toolbar instead. A click leads to the subscription options for the website's RSS feed which is very convenient if you are using RSS.

Update: Mozilla has removed the icon in recent versions of Firefox as well but you can get it back using add-ons

Google Chrome users on the other hand need to locate the RSS feed links on the website to subscribe to feeds which is not very comfortable especially for users who subscribe to RSS feeds regularly.

Apart from making it difficult to locate the feed url, not highlighting that a feed exists may hinder discoverability. Users may come to the conclusion that a site does not support RSS if it does not highlight that a feed exists, for instance via an icon on the website.

Sometimes, the only option to find out if an RSS feed is available, is to open the source code of the website and check whether it is linked in it, or to try and append common feed paths to the URL, e.g. example.com/feed/ or example.com/rss/ in hope that a standard is being used by the site.

RSS Subscription Extension

The RSS Subscription Extension eliminates the issue by adding an RSS icon in the Chrome address bar whenever an RSS feed is detected on the current website.

A click on the icon displays a feed subscription page that can be used to subscribe to the feed in various feed readers like Google Reader or My Yahoo.

This feed subscription page is not displayed to Google Chrome users by default, as they see the full feed provided by the site directly. This unfortunately means that Chrome users will have to copy and paste the RSS feed of the site manually into their RSS reader.

The RSS Subscription extension is compatible with Google Chrome 4 and newer versions of the web browser. It can be downloaded from the official Chrome extension gallery.

Update: The RSS Subscription extension for Google Chrome has been removed from the official Chrome web store.

The RSS Subscriptions with FEED: Handler extension is a more than viable alternative which Google Chrome users can install instead.

It displays an icon all the time in Chrome's main toolbar -- there is no option anymore to display icons in the address bar as Google removed it -- and changes the icon whenever feeds are discovered on the active page.

A click displays all feeds found on the page. You can then copy them by right-clicking on them to import them in your feed reader, or left-click on them if a default feed reader has been set up on the device.

 

Summary
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Software Name
RSS Subscriptions with FEED: Handler
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Browser
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