Chrome 106 may (or may not) include the much-anticipated feed panel.
Feed readers are your one-stop shop for aggregating headlines from your favourite publications for easy reading. Years after the demise of Google Reader, Google Chrome added an RSS feed reader for Android and, shortly after, iOS in October. Unfortunately, a desktop client was still a long way off. However, there is some hope that we are nearing the end of that line.
About Chromebooks discovered some code and early UI related to the feed reader for the desktop client in the ChromeOS 106 developer channel. Users can currently follow a site by opening the right-click menu and selecting the new “Follow site” option. An in-window panel will appear, presumably displaying content from the user’s followed sites, but the interface is currently inoperable.
On mobile, Chrome’s feed reader displays the Follow site button in the menu and the feed content on the New Tab page.
The site reached out to Adrienne Porter Felt, a Chrome engineer, on Twitter for more information on a launch date. She couldn’t be more specific, but she did say that we’ll see more improvements to the mobile feed reader before the desktop version is ready — that said, Chrome 106 feels like a reasonable target to aim for.
Porter Felt also mentioned that Chrome’s web feed reader collects corpus content from sites that do not have an RSS feed. But, are site maps still used on large websites nowadays? Hmm.