(Which is fine by me. Chrome doesn't need to try to be everything to everybody. For that, there's the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite.)
This story seems like people jumping at another chance to further shame google on the Reader front, which is fine, but this seems like a somewhat dishonest opening for it, especially considering the directness of the closing comment.
Well, I can understand that it might not have been for everyone, but it was super convenient to be able to read RSS "folders" in Firefox. I'm a Chrome/Chromium fanboy these days--I use it on all of my devices--but I still miss that feature. If you don't want to use a certain functionality, it's easy to just avoid it; you can't ever use something that isn't implemented, though.
Clicking on a bookmark and seeing the most recent BBC headlines, for example, was awesome.
Some people want a random subset of news for entertainment. G+ is great for that. Here's a great big pile of recent stuff from everyone, a circle, or a community.
On the other hand, lets say I want to verify I read every story from certain sources (perhaps the BBC?) exactly, precisely once. I don't see a way in the G+ UI to "mark as read" or "only display unread" or whatever. Might exist or might be a weird way to hack it in, but its not intuitive.
For some reason option #1 is semi-popular among news readers, social networking, and old fashioned or online broadcasting, but option #2 is nearly universal among email clients and podcast clients. You'd never use an email client with a UI of "here's a random collection of some recent emails" with no way to tag them as read or deleted. I'd LOL at the idea of a podcast client with "here's a random cast that you may or may not have already heard"
Another horrible UI fail is time based. G+ can only do one linear "newest to oldest" sort. Even the dumbest RSS feed readers have some kind of tag/save/star feature. So you can skim the whole feed, star/save/tag good stuff for later detailed reading. Then once there is no "unread" left, start reading the star/save/tag stories in detail, perhaps much later. This "workflow" is impossible in G+ as near as I can tell.
Finally no one using the "RSS" workflow uses G+, so you get the chicken and the egg thing, where there's no demand for even the most primitive of workflow management in G+ because anyone wanting anything like that uses RSS. So the BBC is a bad example in that their social networking people are probably required to use both, but I suspect that 99% of my RSS feeds are not available in G+ because they self segregate by workflow. You'll need a bigger shock to the system than cancelling goog reader. I switched to newsblur once the crushing demand let up a bit. I'm not going to abandon everything I currently enjoy to watch cat videos on G+.
Besides, there's a lot of web content that requires plugins and extensions to view properly. I don't see why that can't be the case here.
RSS is -- the essential concept was even included in the initial vision for the web:
>With help from Robert Cailliau, [Berners-Lee] published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available."
You've got lots of bookmarks. Much as browsers recently started downloading and displaying "favicons" (well, maybe not so recently, I'm an old timer), there is no reason a browser can't download the RSS feed from a site and compare the date of the most recent update to the latest date in the browsers history log. In other words if there's something new, its "bold" in my bookmarks and if not, its regular.
Now this is opt-in spamable, if you're running a journalist site or ecommerce, of course you doctor your sites feed to always appear new in someone's bookmarks even if its the same old recycled garbage. But there's more to the 'net than online stores and tabloid journalism.
Another novel user experience would be the trend of turning the "address/URL bar" into a search gateway bar. I think it fairly logical that if I use the "search" bar it should search and prioritize results from RSS feeds I subscribe to, below my own bookmarks and above generic web search results (aka google)
I don't think RSS is very interesting as "content" or an "app" but it could be pretty useful as metainformation.
Another alternative on Windows is surprisingly IE. The user interface is actually similar to GR where you can read multIple feeds at once when you organIze them In folders. I used it before I switched to GR. It can also import/export OPML