how to detect available RSS feeds on a web page?

Question

I'm writing a second edition of a technical book about a content management system. I am writing a section about how to configure RSS feeds. Then I realized something: It is getting harder to detect RSS in a web browser these days! I wrote about several methods to do this in 2010, and now all the methods I suggested seem to be obsolete.

Firefox seems to have removed their RSS icon. Inded, if this functionality exists in the browser, it seems to be only through a plugin.

As of July 2013 what are the easiest ways to detect an RSS feed if there's no visible sign (an RSS icon, etc).

Are there any websites where you can plug in a URL to see if an RSS feed exists?

Aha, I see that in Firefox, you can do View --> Toolbars --> Customize and then choose the icon for Subscribe/Feeds and drag it to your Firefox toolbar. That's one solution... Any others.

Update #2. Aha, in IE 10, you can go to Tools --> Feed Discovery -->(see if a feed exists). If it does, IE will display it and give you some queries and other options for subscribing and filtering.... (On my laptop, the Tools toolbar was hidden. I had to rightclick on the top toolbar, enable Menu Bar to make it visible again so I could find the Tools menu.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In Firefox (at least my Firefox 21), you can go into Page Info and Feeds. I'm pretty sure this is independent of any add-ons; I got so fed up with having to do that all the time that I hunted down and installed the RSS Icon In Awesomebar add-on. It's a little less un-awesome now. There appears to be a few alternative implementations available.

Answer 2

For Chrome, there is a handy extension from Google called RSS Subscription Extension. It puts the standard RSS icon in the search bar if it detects the page has an RSS feed.

Answer 3

As of 2019, the Feed Indicator extension for Firefox adds back an RSS icon in the address bar for websites that have RSS/Atom feeds.