The 868,163 people who’ve installed Google’s RSS-handling extension for Chrome can breathe a sigh of relief, because Google has resurrected it after its deletion last week. “My RSS extension was removed by mistake, but it is now up again,” said Finnur Thorarinsson, the extension’s author, in a comment to a Chrome RSS-handling feature request. The extension detects RSS and Atom feeds on Web pages and lets people subscribe to them with feed-reading software; it’s been updated so it no longer offers Google Reader as an option for subscribing. Google’s RSS extension for Chrome disappeared last week at the same time that the company announced that it will scrapping Google Reader on July 1. RSS and Atom provide a mechanism to subscribe to Web page updates such as new blog posts, but they aren’t a mainstream phenomenon.
