Adding some thoughts to this, as an RSS consumer.
One of my favorite extensions is Feed Preview by Guido Berhörster. It's got some great RSS features, most of which I'd wish browsers would support natively. I'll list my thoughts below. Most are applicable to this suggestion, while some I could split out into a separate suggestion if you think that would be best.
- Feed indicator should use the feed icon instead of "RSS" for the following reasons: (1) toolbar is already mostly icons (profile/window name are some exceptions), and (2) the feed icon is a more general way of indicating different feed formats (maybe not JSON feed, but the icon is quite ubiquitous).
- Feed indicator should be located next to the reader mode indicator. (subjective input alert) I think it would fit really well in this location.
- Feeds should be listed in a popover (similar to either "Website Settings" with the little triangle, or "Share" without the triangle), and each item should include feed type (RSS, Atom, JSON, etc.) & title ("Untitled Feed" if no title is provided). Example entry (taken from here) could look like this: "Atom Feed: Forum activity".
- (split-able suggestion) Feeds could be styled if MIME type is known. The Feed Preview extension has an implementation of this. You can see an example in the screenshots of the extension page linked above. This one may be pretty hard to sell, but it's quite nice to get a basic preview of what to expect from the feed before subscribing to it. Which leads me to the next suggestion.
- (split-able suggestion) There should be an option to subscribe to the feed! The Feed Preview extension is actually pretty ingenious in this area. It uses a URL template, very much like the one that we have for bookmarks. "%s" would be the feed URL, which most RSS services have a link which you place the URL as a query parameter to quickly subscribe to a feed. Again, you can see an example in the screenshots of the extension page linked above. As far as implementation, I could initially see a single input box in preferences for adding a URL template. For the subscribe button, I could see that as either: (1) a button in the styled page suggested in the point right before this one, or (2) as some form of button in the popover menu of feed entries mentioned in point 3.
That's about all I have for now. If there was an easy way to mock this up in Figma, I would try my hand at it. But I hope that my points are clear enough in the meantime. Looking forward to this feature!
