Shortly after Google announced that they would be killing off Google Reader, angering a significant amount of users, they dealt another blow to RSS by yanking the Google RSS Subscription Chrome extension. More anger ensued. Why must you destroy everything that we love, Google?

Well, here’s a bit of good news: The extension is back.

Finnur Thorarinsson, the author of the extension, announced its return on a Chromium issues thread. According to him, it was removed by mistake.

The extension has been updated to remove Google Reader and iGoogle from the lists of supported feed readers, “to prevent [new users] from getting hooked on Reader and then be disappointed in a few months time,” according to the extension’s author.

Here’s what he had to say:

I’m the author of the RSS Subscription Extension (from Google) and I wanted to provide a quick update on what Peter said.

My RSS extension was removed by mistake but it is now up again on the webstore:

It was not _tied_ to Google Reader, per se, since you choose which feed reader to use — but I’ve now removed the Google Reader option for new users to prevent them from getting hooked on Reader and then be disappointed in a few months time.

Also, please note that even though clones of my extension exist in the webstore, some of them were copied a long time ago and have not been updated since. They might therefore be vulnerable to security issues and can not really be recommended without making sure they’ve kept up with the times.

The RSS Subscription extension allows users to quickly add RSS and Atom feeds to a variety of feed readers. That functionality still remains, minus the ability to subscribe via Google Reader.

So, Google, burned down the house and spared one small possession from the fire. For what it’s worth, Thorarinsson himself is just as upset about the whole Google Reader shutdown as the rest of us.

“I’m an avid user of Google Reader and am pretty unhappy about the Reader situation as well,” he says.

[h/t CNET]