With Microsoft about to unveil the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9, I thought I should take some time to cover probably the only regression that will impact a lot of people. Before I start, I'd like to make myself clear that this regression is worth the massive improvements that Internet Explorer 9 brings across the board.

As you may have guessed from the title, it surrounds subscribing to RSS feeds. With the new slimmed down, and to the point IE, the RSS subscription button is no longer displayed by default. It's hidden in the optional command bar.

In many cases this isn't a problem, click on a link to the RSS feed on a webpage and Internet Explorer will open it in feed view, where you can easily subscribe to it anyway.

The problem comes from websites that don't actually give you a link to their RSS feeds on the page. Typically they would expect you to click on a web browsers feed button to view it, with it no longer displayed in IE9, that may be a tad annoying.

The other problem comes from websites that use services like Feedburner, when they detect a web browser, rather than a feed client display it in a "friendly" view, which makes IE9, and other browsers think it is actually a website, and hence does not enable feed view mode.

There are two quick and simple workarounds for this.

The fastest in my opinion is to hit ALT to open the traditional style menu, click Tools and make your way down to Feed discovery, accessing any feed listed there will display it in feed mode.

Subscribing to an RSS feed in Internet Explorer 9

Alternatively you can turn on the command bar, which can be done by right-clicking on an empty area of IE9's user interface, an empty area next to a tab for example, and choosing Command bar from the menu. That'll turn the command bar, with the Home, Feed, Print, Page, Tools options that IE has had for the last two versions.

Subscribing to an RSS feed in Internet Explorer 9