The experimental Canary version of Chrome for Android (and only for USERS in the US) will get an interesting update in the coming weeks in the form of RSS, the once-popular format for getting updates from all your favorite websites in Google Reader and similar services.
In Chrome, users will soon see the “follow” feature of an RSS-enabled website, and the browser’s “new TAB” page will get what is essentially a (very) basic RSS reader – I think you could almost call it Google Reader.
Now we are not talking about a comprehensive RSS reader. The new TAB will show updates from sites you follow in chronological order, but it doesn’t look like you can easily switch between different sources. Still, it is a good start.
Image credit: Google
“Today, people have many ways to learn about their favorite sites, including subscribing to mailing lists, notifications, and RSS feeds. “This is a big problem for anyone, so we’re exploring how to simplify the experience of getting the latest information directly from your favorite websites in Chrome, built on the open RSS Web standard,” Janice Wong, Google Chrome product manager, wrote in today’s update. “Our vision is to help people connect directly with their favorite publishers and creators on the web.”
A Google spokesperson told me that the company has implemented this by having Google “grab RSS feeds more frequently to ensure that Chrome is able to deliver the latest and greatest content to users in the ‘Follow’ section of the new TAB.”
RSS is one of the fundamental technologies of the Web 2.0 era. Even today, it’s still the easiest way to get up-to-date updates on your favorite sites (although some may no longer offer feeds), and no recommendation algorithms get in your way. While RSS is very useful, the user experience is not always ideal, although services like Google Reader (RIP) and Feedly do a lot to make subscribing and getting updates easy enough. But that era ended when Google stopped offering Google Reader in 2013. There are, of course, die-hard news fans who still 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 like an open web, RSS is a good solution, even if it’s sometimes clunky.
But for now, it’s just an experiment. Google said it wanted to gather feedback from “publishers, bloggers, creators and citizens of the open web” as it aimed to build “deeper engagement between users and web publishers in Chrome”.
The original link: techcrunch.com/2021/05/19/…