In a bid to help users follow their favourite website, Google Chrome tests a new Follow Button to Subscribe to the RSS Feed of a website.
The new follow button is said to be appearing only for select users in the US who are using Chrome Canary for Android.
So, if you are using the latest Chrome Canary for Android in the US and want to know whether you have gained this feature then look for the follow button in the Overflow menu once you open a website like shown in the screenshot below.
As soon as you tap on the follow button, you subscribe to the RSS feed of the website and then you can see the latest content of the website beside the For You section in your Chrome app as shown in the screenshot above.
Google Chrome New Follow Button is Based on Open RSS Web Standard
Google has revealed about this experiment via a Chromium blog post in which it said, it has created this feature based on the Open RSS web standard. Those of you who don’t know, the Open RSS web standard allows users to access the updates of a website in standardized computer readable format.
Websites who have their RSS feed will automatically be eligible for the above described follow button. However, websites who haven’t an RSS feed, Google will index those sites based on its own indexing solution.
This is not the first time Google has put its hand on RSS technology. If you remember Google has killed its RSS reader – Google Reader back in 2013. Seems like Google is now realizing the growing popularity of RSS as it is one of most popular ways of accessing the latest content of a website beside notification, subscription and other models and Google Chrome could be the best platform to integrate this technology.