Chrome 19 (just released to the stable channel) includes support for Web Intents, and the support is further improved in Chrome 20 (currently in the beta channel). One of the improvements is that downloaded RSS and Atom feeds will now dispatch a view intent. This is neat, getting things a bit closer to truly fixing one of the earliest Chrome bug reports. However, if you're occasionally engaged in some technology necrophilia, then you might prefer seeing the angle brackets instead of handing over the feed to another app.

To that end, I've made Feed Intent Viewer, a simple intent handler that shows the feed as pretty-printed XML. Once you install it, clicking on links such as this one will trigger the sheet shown on the right, and choosing the "Feed Intent Viewer" app will show you your beloved angle brackets.

It's implemented as a packaged app (source), so that all of the feed data is processed locally, instead of being sent to a server. Even better, the download system includes the downloaded data with the intent (as a Blob) so that it doesn't have to be re-fetched at all. When the intent is dispatched with just a URL, then the data is fetched via XMLHttpRequest (this explains why the app has the "your data on all websites" permission). The new-ish responseType property of XHR is used, so that it can also be read as a blob. The feed blob data is read via a FileReader into a string, so that some light pre-processing can happen (currently, just removal of stylesheets, allowing the raw XML can be displayed). Finally, the feed text is put back into a blob that's served with a text/xml MIME type. This makes WebKit's XML viewer kick in, saving me the trouble of actually having to pretty-print anything.

While writing this up, I got a sense of déjà vu, which turned out to be warranted: In 2007, I created a similar hack to get Firefox 2.0 to show pretty-printed XML for feeds, instead of something friendlier.