Even now, Google Reader is defunct but its spirit lives on through a “follow button” for Chrome. Google first started experimenting with it in May. So far, this RSS tracking feature was limited to the experimental Canary versions of Chrome on Android. Today, according to Adrienne Porter Felt, a director of engineering on Chrome Google started enabling it on stable versions of the browser.
Users can follow a site through the browser’s three-dot menu to subscribe to its RSS feed and have it update in your Chrome app. You will find sites that you are following in a tab called “following”. The following tab sits along with Google’s “for you” tab of recommended articles. As of now, this feature is not out yet on iOS.
According to Felt, It is not very clear how many people have access to the new feature by default but you can enable it yourself by entering chrome://flags in your address bar and turning it on under the web feed.
Currently, the Chrome follows button is a mobile-only feature. iOS and desktop versions are going to come soon. Whenever it comes, it will disappoint some Google Reader power users but it is nice to see Google keeping the RSS fire alive in some way or other. This makes the Chrome app more crowded and feature-rich if you were looking for a free and low-fuss way of keeping control of your favorite sites at once.
