Google Chrome for Mac came out of beta today (see “Google Chrome for Mac: Ready, beta, now stable!“) with many new features, but not with built-in RSS support. Even my first-generation iPhone can do better than that (granted, with a redirect through an Apple server to parse the XML of the feed into something intelligible). An RSS feed still displays as a jumble of text:
Not that I spend a lot of time reading RSS feeds in my browser, but if I click on one (intentionally or otherwise), I really ought not get gibberish. If Google intends Chrome to be a serious competitor in a marketplace of choice for Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, it really ought not leave users in the lurch. This is very un-Google-like behavior.
This is just the most recent in my series of rants about Google Chrome and RSS here, here, and here.
There is an official Google extension for this –
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en
as well as MANY other extensions depending on how you want to deal with RSS feeds.
From my point of view it makes much more sense to have this type of external filetype viewer as an optional plugin than hard-coding a one-size-fits-all solution into the browser. So my question is not ‘why no built in RSS viewer?’ but ‘what are they doing hard-coding flash into the browser?’
I clearly hadn’t done my homework, but I can’t see the *average* user realizing that they needed to go get a plugin to read the contents of a link they can click on the screen. Seems wrong, to me.