Add Firefox-Style RSS Feeds With Foxish [Google Chrome]

Add Firefox-Style RSS Feeds With Foxish [Google Chrome]:

Do you love Chrome, but miss having live RSS feeds in your bookmark toolbar and menus? Foxish brings this famous Firefox feature to Chrome, and it’s only a click away. Firefox has, for ages, offered built-in support for RSS feeds. Showing up essentially as folders in Firefox’s bookmark menu and toolbar, RSS feeds in Firefox make it easy to keep up with blogs and other websites that regularly update.

So it was strange when Google Chrome launched and they didn’t include this feature. Four years later and this hasn’t changed. Open an RSS feed with Chrome and you’ll be offered a variety of web-based RSS readers, like Google Reader, but not the option to add the feed to your bookmarks.

Many people think this was a bad move by Google and the Chrome team, even if they switched from Firefox to Chrome. Do you agree with them? If so, then you’re in luck! Foxish, an extension for Chrome, lets you put your feeds where you want them – with your bookmarks.

Adding RSS Feeds To Chrome’s Bookmarks Toolbar

Go ahead and install Foxish for Google Chrome. When you do, you’ll notice an icon in your toolbar when a site offers an RSS feed:

The icon is the famous RSS feed icon, shaped like a fox for some reason. Whether this is clever or not is up to you, but this reviewer would prefer the standard RSS icon. Oh well, it’s a minor complaint. Click the superfluously foxy icon to add the RSS feed of the site you’re visiting as a bookmark.

Note that this will also come up should you manually open any RSS feed. You can, in this settings screen, give the feed a custom name and put it wherever you’d like it to be. Add as many RSS feeds as you care to keep up with, and you’ll be browsing headlines from your bookmarks in no time.

Want to change a few things? Head to the extension’s settings panel and you can adjust the frequency of updates (polling time) and delete feeds you no long need.

Delete a feed here and it might not disappear from your menu. It also won’t update anymore, so you might as well delete it. Take note – moving a folder in Chrome’s bookmark settings alone might break the feed. Be sure to head to this menu should you move a folder.

You can also export all of your RSS feeds as an OPML file, so you can take your feeds with you to another RSS reader later should you give up on bookmark RSS feeds. It’s always nice to have another option.

Conclusion

On one hand, I understand why Chrome doesn’t offer RSS integration. Are bookmark folders the best place to get updates from your favorite websites? Probably not. Sometimes it’s nice, however, to see headlines at a glance. That’s where Firefox’s RSS feature was great, so it’s nice having this feature in Chrome.

Do you like having RSS feeds with your bookmarks? Share your thoughts in the comments below, along with any other Firefox features you’d like to add to Chrome.