I designed Chrome, and was responsible for decisions around its UI, including the addition and removal of the RSS button.<p>Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of the time, was to only offer what people needed, and allow extensions to cover everything else.<p>I loved RSS. We all did. I still use Feedly every day and mourn the loss of Google Reader. But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase. If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button).<p>Extensions was our "if you want it, you can add it" answer. It was imperfect, because it didn't allow ideas such as RSS to be advertised to the mainstream, but we had already clearly seen that that hadn't worked, and regardless, your daily tools should not be a place for pushing agendas unless you have total confidence that they will be valued.<p>I still think "following stuff" is an unsolved, undervalued problem and big opportunity space