The Opera “feed reader” is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever used and certainly a far cry from what IE has implemented and the Feedview Extension UI that Firefox has been working on incorporating. On the other hand, Safari, whose feed view is similar (but still very lacking in functionality) chooses to use its blue RSS icon instead.

It’s a non-issue anyways. Users who can figure out how to install and use an “alternative” browser will figure out how their “alternative” does feeds. The real issue here is to encourage website authors to find some consistently in linking to RSS feeds, or just drop the links entirely and use auto-discovery.

I’m tired of seeing: A) a gazillion ’subscribe me, add me, digg me, vote for me, share me’ buttons screaming of pseudo-self-importance B) Obscured links to three different versions of feeds, none of which have any icons, buried somewhere 75.2% down the sidebar and no auto-discovery mechanism in place. and C) Orange XML/RSS images that link not to a main site feed, but to an HTML 4.0/transitional landing page for hundreds of feeds broken down by category of which the majority haven’t been updated in over a year.

If IE hadn’t taken the Feed icon from Mozilla, we would continue to have dozens of different icons and no one would really care or discuss it much. Just because IE suddenly chose to use the same one as Mozilla doesn’t make it a standard.

Sure, it would be nice if we all spoke English and got along nicely. But there’s nothing forcing us to do so either.