Google Chrome's New RSS Reader Is A Sight For Sore, News Deprived Eyes

Chrome's RSS Reader, after being discontinued, is now finally back in the browser's public release, to full effect.

RSS new consumption is a field that is going very well for itself in the current generation. This in and of itself is quite surprising, since less than a decade ago analysts and developers were openly discussing the death of the news aggregators as a whole. The center of all of this debate? Google Chrome's own RSS reader, entitled Google Web Feed. Well, nothing of this came to fruition, RSS readers remain to this day an incredibly popular form of news dissemination, and Google Chrome has even brought a new RSS reader into the mix, finally making up for the annoyance users felt when Google Reader was shut down and locked away.

The RSS form of media consumption, for those unaware, is a practice that was both started and popularized by the New York Times. In the early 2000s, at a time where newspapers were still finding their online footing, the NYT decided to use the already existing technology in order to aggregate important and intriguing headlines for users to go through. Suddenly, users were bombarded by a layout of headlines and articles that almost anyone could find something interesting from. Other news outlets got the wind of this development and got to work. Around 2005 was the time that browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Safari decided that they too would like to be a part of this new wave.

On top of Chrome reigniting its RSS reader, the browser's also getting a new feature by the name of Web Feed. As elaborated upon by Chrome browser engineer Adrienne Porter Felt, users can now follow different websites, after which their RSS updates will show up on the browser's New Tab webpage. Instead of irrelevant headlines that users wouldn't appreciate, Google's userbase can now mold their news feeds around hyper specific, niche interests as well as more generic terms.


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