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Apologies if this has already been suggested! Nothing similar turned up with a quick search.

Something I really enjoyed about older versions of Safari was how it would show an indicator in its address bar when a site had RSS/Atom feeds available (see screenshot), often in cases where the feeds weren't obviously advertised on the pages themselves. Clicking the indicator yielded a menu of feeds available for the site.

Subscribing to feeds is likely beyond the scope of Orion, but I think the address bar indicator that forwards feed URLs to the user's default RSS reader would be a nice feature to integrate. While this is possible with existing Chrome/Firefox extensions, it being a native feature would allow an extra degree of polish and eliminate need for an extension that has permission to see all site contents, as is necessary for extensions to be able to detect the presence of feeds.

Screenshot of Safari 4.x RSS indicator

  • Vlad replied to this.

    jwells89 Agreed, this is useful. It can also be unnecessary for some people, how do we properly allow for it to be toggled?

    Orion is open to standards and protocols and that is why we are saving FTP support while other major browsers are shutting it down. RSS is one such protocol.

      Good question. It's simple enough that it could be a menu item that could be toggled under the View menu, but I could also see it fitting in as a checkbox under the Browsing tab of the Preferences window.

      If it would be helpful, I can probably pull up an old version of Safari on one of my machines to see what Apple's approach to this was if they allowed the feature to be turned off.

      • Vlad replied to this.

        Pulled out an old PowerBook running Tiger and it looks like Safari as of 4.x didn't have any way to turn the indicator off. It has a dedicated prefpane in Preferences for RSS, but the options it contains pertains solely to its reader rather than the indicator.

        Searching the web, the closest thing that was possible was some version that allowed RSS support to be disabled entirely through a hidden Debug menu option, as detailed in this blog post. This option is not visible in the version of Safari I have.

          5 days later

          Thanks! I like the idea of using View -> Hide RSS indicator.

            a month later

            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!

            • Vlad replied to this.
              a year later

              Although this was included in the release notes for 0.99.126.4.1.8-rc, I'm not seeing the indicator on any site with and RSS feed.

                20 days later
                a year later

                Is there a way to indicate RSS feeds from Orion for iOS?

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