The major browsers used to indicate that a website had an RSS feed by displaying the orange RSS icon in the address bar at the far right of the bar. This no longer happens but an extension offered by Google's Ireland division adds it back to Chrome.
The RSS Subscription Extension looks for a site's feeds using RSS Autodiscovery. A feed is identified using a link element in the page header.
After you install the extension, click the three-dot kebab menu in the browser's upper right corner, then choose Extensions > Manage Extensions. A page opens listing the extensions on your browser. Click the Details button for the RSS Subscription Extension and toggle the Pin to Toolbar setting.
The RSS Blog identifies its RSS feed with this HTML in the head section:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="The RSS Blog" href="https://rssweblog.com/rss-feed" />
If you have the RSS Subscription Extension with the Toolbar visible, the RSS icon in the toolbar changes from gray to orange when you're visiting this blog. When the icon is clicked a page opens displaying recent feed items with a Subscribe Now button and a drop-down containing five readers as choices along with Manage. The current selection of readers is Newsblur, My Yahoo, Feedly, Inoreader and The Old Reader.
A page can contain more than one link element when it has multiple feeds, such as the example of a website that has a feed for blog posts and another for comments. Clicking the orange RSS icon opens a drop-down menu of these feeds, which can be chosen to open the Subscribe Now page for that feed.
A lot of Chrome extensions are hard to trust because they come from a publisher you don't know or have a low download count. This one comes from Google and has been installed 400,000 times. The person we found about it from on Mastodon said they've been using it for four years.
Categories: RSS, RSS Autodiscovery, Google Chrome
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