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> Chrome never implemented RSS auto discovery. Chrome has an official extension for RSS auto-discovery: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscript
by jmillikin 14y ago
> Chrome never implemented RSS auto discovery.
Chrome has an official extension for RSS auto-discovery: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-e...
The Chrome team argues that not enough people use RSS to justify having an icon in the URL bar by default. I personally think this is somewhat circular reasoning ("People don't use RSS, so we won't show an icon letting them know about RSS"), but sadly other browsers such as Firefox have followed their lead and removed RSS notifications by default.
Also, whether or not the browser implements native RSS auto-discovery is irrelevant to the point of the article. The Chrome extension in the article could be easily implemented by checking for a special <link> element, so that no URLs need to be sent back to Google just to know that the page is Plus-enabled.
However, off the top of my head, there's a good reason why this wouldn't do much good. The advertised functionality of the Google+ extension requires details about the Google+ stream that the page links to. If the extension checked for a <link>, it would still need to send the URL in that link to Google to get those stream details. The privacy improvement seems marginal.
In the end, I think this complaint is better served by declaring that the URLs aren't recorded. Google's DNS and Omnibox already have similar declarations, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.
- azakai 14y ago> sadly other browsers such as Firefox have followed their lead and removed RSS notifications by default. ? I am on Firefox, no addons, and I have a menu item Bookmarks->Subscribe to this page which detects RSS/Atom.
- pseut 14y agoThere used to be an icon in the address bar letting you know the website has an RSS feed and that's been removed from Firefox.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jmillikin 14y agoFirefox used to have an RSS icon in the address bar when a page referenced an RSS feed. This was an easy way to notify the user that a particular page supported RSS. The icon was removed in Firefox 4, causing much annoyance among people who use RSS (c.f. http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/01/firefox-4-ditches-the-rss-button-heres-how-to-get-it-back/ http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/01/firefox-4-ditches-the-rss-b... )
- azakai 14y agoOh ok, that is definitely a change then, but it's a minor UI change of moving a button into a menu.
- a_p 14y agoTHe RSS button is still available. Just click Nightly -> Options -> Toolbar Layout and drag the RSS button onto the toolbar.
- solarflair 14y agoThe key word here is "default."
- tomkarlo 14y agoIf something makes no sense to 90% of users it probably shouldn't be a default, it should be an option.
- tomkarlo 14y agoIt's not the responsibility of the Chrome team to promote RSS if the large share of users aren't asking for it. To do so would actually be kind of anti-user. Much of what Chrome's done over time has been to remove extraneous UX elements and reduce the browser to a frame; this seems consistent with that.