Recently, I switched to Chrome. In general, I prefer it to Firefox, but there are some differences that bug me. The biggest is the inability to auto-discover feeds and load them in NetNewsWire (or your desktop feed reader of choice). The RSS Subscription Extension got me close, but I had to figure out the rest. Here are step by step instructions.

1. Go to the extension page and install the RSS Subscription Extension.
2. Navigate to any page that has a discoverable feed set up and click on the feed icon in the location bar.
3. Click on the dropdown that defaults to ‘Google Reader’ and click on ‘Manage…’.
4. Click the ‘Add…’ button.
5. Enter ‘NetNewsWire’ (or whatever) as the description and the following code as the URL: javascript:var url=decodeURIComponent('%s');var feedWindow = window.open('feed://' + url.substr(7)); feedWindow.close();
6. Go back to your blog of choice, click on the feed icon and, NetNewsWire now being your default, click the ‘Subscribe Now’ button.
7. PROFIT.

I won’t go into boring detail, but we need to use javascript because %s writes out an encoded version of the feed URL. So we’re copying the URL, decoding it, opening a window with the feed protocol, then closing the window.

As I noted before, this isn’t just for NetNewsWire, but for any desktop feed reader. If you want to know how to set your feed reader to be the default for the feed protocol, just ask Google (but you’ll need to use another browser).