Chrome 106 may (or may not) have the feed panel we’re all waiting for
Feed readers are your one-stop shop for collecting headlines from all over your favorite publications for easy perusal. In October, Google Chrome brought in an RSS feed reader — years after the demise of Google Reader — for Android and, shortly after, iOS. A desktop client was, unfortunately, a long way to go. But there’s some hope that we may be nearing the end of that line.
About Chromebooks uncovered some code and early UI in the developer channel for ChromeOS 106 related to the feed reader for the desktop client. At the moment, it appears that users can follow a site by opening up the right-click menu and selecting the new “Follow site” option. An in-window panel will appear, presumably showing content from the user’s followed sites, but at the moment, the interface isn’t working.
Chrome’s feed reader on mobile places the Follow site button in the ⋮ menu and the feed content on the New Tab page.
The site contacted Adrienne Porter Felt, a Chrome engineer, on Twitter for more details on a launch timeline. She wasn’t able to specify, but suggested that we’ll see more improvements to the mobile feed reader before the desktop version would be ready — that said, Chrome 106 does feel like a realistic target to aim for.
One other tidbit: Porter Felt also noted that Chrome’s web feed reader also takes corpus content from sites that don’t operate an RSS feed. Are site maps still a thing on big websites these days, though? Hmm.