Google added an RSS feed reader to its Chrome browser in October last year. It lets you follow websites to get an automatically updated feed of articles published by those sites. The feature was initially available to Android users but the company promised to bring it to the iOS app as well as the desktop client. True to its promise, Google rolled out the RSS feed reader to Chrome users with iPhones shortly after. However, the feature continued to be missing on the desktop version of the browser. But the wait may not be much longer now. Folks over at About Chromebooks spotted code related to the RSS feed reader in ChromeOS 106 Dev Channel. The publication could also uncover a partially functional UI for the feature, suggesting that Google has already made significant progress in its development. According to the new report, users would be able to follow sites from the context menu (right-click). The menu adds a new “Follow site” option above the “Send to your devices”. If you select this option, Chrome will provide you with a feed of all future articles published by the site. Google is preparing an in-window panel for the feed. It appears on the side but is non-functional currently. Since the RSS feed reader for ChromeOS and the Chrome desktop browser is still in development, these implementations may change before the public rollout. On mobile apps, the “Follow” button resides under the three-dot menu while the feed shows up on the New Tab page.
Google’s RSS feed reader is coming to the Chrome desktop client
The code spotted in ChromeOS 106 Dev Channel referred to this feature as a web feed. To confirm that it’s the same RSS feed reader that is already available on Chrome mobile browsers, About Chromebooks reached out to Adrienne Porter Felt, Director of Engineering for Chrome. She confirmed it but noted that the feature can also pull up corpus content from sites that provide RSS support. As for the desktop rollout, Adrienne suggested there’s still some time to it. She said the company is working on improving the mobile version. The RSS feed reader will hit Chrome on desktops after that. We will let you know when the rollout begins.
