Yikes, seems like few people use the RSS icon to subscribe. I'd better an "RSS Subscribe" link to my website.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn...
It's even a product of Google themselves.
Its not built into chrome like it should be.
A convenience item, certainly, but a requirement? RSS has a bit of a marketing problem to resolve before I'd say it absolutely must be there.
(Also, you don't have to use Google Reader; it actually produces a reasonable in-browser rendering of an RSS feed, if you click the icon in the URL bar.)
Because of this, many blogs have links to their RSS/Atom feed with a fat "Subscribe" logo -- on Chrome, when you click that, you get a massive page of unparsed XML.
Whether a given grandma knows what RSS is or not is beside the point, it's lame of Google not to follow a defacto standard that many sites rely upon when there is no technical reason not to.
It seems weird the Chrome works so hard to integrate PDF / Flash / etc. so the users don't have to think about it and really push the envelope with their browser... yet they refuse to even honor RSS.
I also think it makes it a whole lot less technical when its built in to the browser. I could have no idea what an rss feed is but since opera tells me that I can subscribe, I subscribe and then it opens them to be read. I then remember the orange icon and know how it works on any site.
Thats a lot easier then taking the feed coping the url into a feed reader and having to open that every day to read my feeds.