In a previous post I asked for suggestions about what icon/button would be best to allow the user to subscribe to a feed. Well, I think I have finally come up with an answer: get rid of the orange button altogether. Let the browser do the work. For example, both Safari and Firefox can automatically determine if a feed is available by looking at the HTML. Both browsers display a button informing the user that a feed is available. If you click on it, it displays a rendering of the RSS feed. Nice, but not quite there. If I click on it, I want the feed adding to my existing collection of feeds that I am subscribed to.

Browsers need to support a one-click subscription mechanism. The user clicks on the button, they are subscribed. This doesn’t happen at the moment. Flock has a nice feature that allows you to look at an aggregrated view of all the feeds you are subscribed to instead of just the individual feeds.

Obviously this solution depends on all browsers natively supporting RSS, which at the time of writing they do not. Still, it will happen. It’s just a question of when.