Microsoft’s RSS team has announced that the icon they will use to identify available RSS feeds in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 is…the one that Firefox is already using.
Iâm excited to announce that weâre adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isnât the first time that weâve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and weâre sure it wonât be the last.
I think it is a great idea that the two top browsers can use a common icon for RSS feeds. The more that we can standardize things like this, the better it will be for everyone, and especially for the adoption rate of RSS amongst non-technical internet users.
Sweet! One of the problems with users new to RSS is the complete lack of any consistency when representing feeds. Those XML chicklets are almost meaningless to most people, and it doesn’t help much when they click on them only to get a bunch of source code or a download dialog. I use this same icon on my website to represent feeds, and link it to a source that will render in the browser if not used to subscribe to the feed.
I agree with Doug, I’m glad that there finally is some sort of consistency with RSS representation, however, I wish Microsoft would exchange other ideas with Mozilla other than visual presentation ones.
Since when did Microsoft start telling people that they’re copying their ideas?