Support for automatic discovery of Web pages that offer RSS or other subscription services has been missing from Chrome since its launch, but Google now has published a document detailing how it plans to address that weakness.
"We will auto detect RSS and Atom feeds using the standard auto discovery tags," according to the developer document about Chrome support for RSS and Atom, a similar technology for letting people sign up for update "feeds" such as new blog postings. "When a feed is available for a page, we will display an RSS icon in the address bar."
Firefox shows the standard orange feed icon in its address bar when it encounters a site that has offers a feed; clicking it lets a person subscribe to the feed with a Web service such as Bloglines, My Yahoo, or Google Reader. Internet Explorer lets people subscribe to the feed using itself as the feed-reading software.
Chrome's subscription mechanism works as follows: when a person clicks on the feed link, Chrome will display a browser-formatted version of the content. Above the content is a "subscribe now" button with a drop-down menu that lets a person select a specific feed reader.
"A newly added feed reader becomes the default selected option the next time a feed is previewed," the document said.
However, there's no indication about when the approach will come to fruition. Google also showed a similar planning document for Chrome extensions, but version 1.0 has been released and there's still no way to use AdBlock Plus or Roboform, the two Firefox extensions I hear the most requests for in Chrome.
Google continues with its approach of release early and iterate often, though. On Wednesday, it released a new developer version of Chrome, 1.0.154.39.
The new version fixes a spate of bugs, including a couple that hampered use of Microsoft's Hotmail and the activation of the F1 function key to show Google's Chrome help site.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.com.
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