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Mozilla Internet Explorer The Internet

IE And Mozz Collaborate On RSS Icon 286

Posted by Zonk from the working-together-to-make-the-internet-better dept.
sylverboss writes "The Microsoft Team RSS blog is reporting that IE7 is adopting the RSS icon used in Firefox. They all agreed that it's in the user's best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser. The increasing collaborative efforts between the browser vendors in the last few weeks is an honest attempt to create a standard Web interface for everyone, no matter what browser is used."
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IE And Mozz Collaborate On RSS Icon More

IE And Mozz Collaborate On RSS Icon

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  • Good (Score:5, Funny)

    by eneville ( 745111 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:37PM (#14265922) Homepage
    I hope MS adopt other features. IE will only get better through competing with a stronger player.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)

      by vishbar ( 862440 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:47PM (#14266016)
      Collaberating on a 32x32 (if that) bitmap? Call me a cynic, but I don't give a flying fudge. IE needs to actually adopt features that matter. You know, proper CSS implementation comes to mind... This seems like an instance for Microsoft to say "Hey look, we cooperate! I mean goddamn...that's a nice icon!"

      Don't get me wrong, I think it's good that they're collaberating, but call me when they cooperate on something functional.

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Call Me Black Cloud ( 616282 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:59PM (#14266136)

        You think this doesn't matter? It's like the "want of a nail" story. Most people don't know about RSS. Coming up with a standard representation in the browser will allow sites to standardize on the icon. The icon will be seen more frequently, become more familiar, and then with that familiarity the awareness of RSS will increase. This is a good thing. Something small can have a big effect.

        • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:41PM (#14266494) Journal
          Apple use a blue box with the letters 'RSS' in it for RSS feeds. This is a bad idea because:
          1. They use RSS for Atom feeds as well, so it's not even accurate if you are using the IETF standard feed format.
          2. The average user has no more idea what RSS is than they do HTML (probably less). It's just another acronym.
          The Mozilla icon isn't great, but it's relatively good and if it becomes a standard then it will help users. Does anyone else remember when Apple had all of the best UI designers?

          • Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)

            by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

            Does anyone else remember when Apple had all of the best UI designers?

            No, but I do remember when Apple only supported a 1 button mouse and you couldn't use the finder (or anything else) from the keyboard except for accepting default choices. Is that relevant?

        • Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @04:35PM (#14266984)
          So how is it that, despite the Opera, MSIE, Netscape, Firefox and Mozilla icons all looking completely different, people still manage to get onto the web?

          Besides, anyone interested in RSS is savvy enough to know the acronym without the need for a pretty standardized icon.

        • Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Aqua OS X ( 458522 )
          As a graphic and interface designer, I think that icon blows. Visually, it doesn't speak to RSS at all. It looks like something that should be associated with wireless or audio.

          However, I HIGHLY doubt those MS folks flew all the way down to California to simply discuss the adoption of one icon.

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

        by NickFitz ( 5849 ) <slashdot.nickfitz@co@uk> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:39PM (#14266468) Homepage

        call me when they cooperate on something functional

        What sort of thing? Stuff like

        Microsoft have been justly lambasted over the past few years for their failure to keep IE up to date, but (perhaps prompted by the success of Firefox) they are now doing real work to improve matters, and this has been accompanied by an unprecendented degree of openness and clarity. Time will tell just how much they achieve on their promises, but it's clearly wrong to suggest that this rather trivial piece of news is all that's been happening over the past year.

        If you're really interested in functional improvements made by Microsoft then rather than waiting for us to call you, you could try subscribing to a few feeds. Here's one to get you started: IEBlog [msdn.com] (Atom 0.3).

        (Oh no, I defended Microsoft; there goes 8 years of karma... :-)

        • Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)

          by IAmTheDave ( 746256 )
          What sort of thing? Stuff like...

          I think that Microsoft is starting to realize that karma actually counts towards something. You've got Firefox and the team basically getting MS level advertising for free. Google's mantra of "do no evil" has helped rocket them to a huge stock price.

          Microsoft is starting to realize that sometimes, making things work for the user, the way the user wants (not the way MS wants) is enough to give you a better image.

          Heck, I applaud MS for all the things listed in the pa

        • Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)

          by lpangelrob ( 714473 )
          You know, I wonder what the browser world will look like 10 months after IE 7 comes out... eventually.

          I thought about this earlier, and I'm pretty sure I'm not being pessimisstic — we know that Microsoft has (though doesn't always take advantage of) some of the best talent in the world. Has it been considered that there may be features in IE7 that will obsolete Firefox 1.0/1.5/2.0?

          If so (and at this point I have to imagine that in spite of the organizational problems inherent to company, developme

      • Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

        If IE needs an RSS icon, that means that they're implementing some form of RSS feature. Possibly as a sidebar or maybe just Live Bookmarks, Firefox style. (The article isn't very clear on where they're using it.)

        So, in a sense, this means Microsoft is implementing a web standard: RSS.

        Which, arguably, is a feature that matters. The current version of IE has absolutely no RSS support.

        • Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)

          by shaitand ( 626655 )
          It always depresses me to see microsoft implement a standard. Because a standard microsoft implementation means proprietary extensions that violate the entire concept of a standard.

      • Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)

        by slashrogue ( 775436 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:48PM (#14266545)
        Obviously you've never had to do the trick of using IE's icon for the Firefox shortcut on someone else's computer because they just don't understand web pages without clicking on that big blue e.

      • Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Eil ( 82413 )
        First, don't reply to the first high-score comment in order to get your comment to appear at the top of the page. That's just annoying. Your post had nothing to do with the parent.

        Second, if you think about Microsoft's attitude towards previous competitors, this is an enormous step forward. I mean, I'm still in shock myself. Cooperating with the competition (though MS probably still considers Firefox, Konqueror, and Safari small fry) is unheard of and practically blasphemous. It seems to me that the MS is a

      • Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kermitthefrog917 ( 903403 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @05:27PM (#14267530)
        Doesn't look like collaboration to me... last time I checked it takes two to collaborate, whereas here Microsoft is merely following Mozilla's lead...

      • Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)

        by labratuk ( 204918 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:31PM (#14268489)
        Collaberating on a 32x32 (if that) bitmap? Call me a cynic, but I don't give a flying fudge.
        Come on. It's a 32bit RGBA image, 32 by 32 pixels. That means it could have been (2^32)*32*32 - 1 = 4,398,046,511,103 other things. But they chose that one. That has to mean something.
    • Why was that modded "Funny"?

      +5 Insightful

  • And here I thought (Score:4, Funny)

    by spurtle15 ( 899792 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:37PM (#14265930)
    that competition between standards [slashdot.org] were good.

  • Collaboration? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ral315 ( 741081 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:38PM (#14265932)
    I wouldn't call it that. IE's trying to share the icon with Mozilla, so when IE7 comes out, it's easier for Mozilla users to migrate back to IE.

    • Re:Collaboration? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:46PM (#14266003)
      Come on, it's a damn icon! 28x28 pixels, thats it. Don't too read much into it.
    • It's just as likely to work the other way.

      • Re:Collaboration? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ral315 ( 741081 )
        Not necessarily. Most of the people who know what RSS is tend to, at the very least, have tried out Firefox. If IE uses the same RSS icon, it would be another reason for semi-technical users to switch back.

    • Re:Collaboration? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alternate Interior ( 725192 ) * <slashdot.alternateinterior@com> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:52PM (#14266071) Homepage
      That could be. A common interface for applications does quite a bit for user-portability. Mozilla and Firefox, for instance, have long had near identical rendering. As Firefox started gaining momentum, some people (I seem to remember Scott Finney of www.scotsnewsletter.com fame claiming a difference in near-1.0 days) claimed differences, but if existant at all, they were certainly not what held back Firefox converts. No, the interface similarities between Firefox and Internet Explorer are what allowed FF to succeed where Mozilla (suite) failed.

      IE still has an enormous bulk of users, but those they've lost are power users and web developers. Web developers, more than anyone, are the ones who have controlled browser success. They're not OSS fanboys, they are the ones that want the best working conditions available. They took IE4 over Netscape 4, and FF over IE6. They have no issue reverting to IE if IE resumes its best-of-category status.

      But these are also the people who couldn't convert to FF until it was IE-like enough. And now that they've adopted to FF conventions, IE needs to be sufficently FF-like to allow their return. These are the people who use things like RSS, and anyone new to the scene that knows ANYTHING is going to default to FF at this point. Therefore, Microsoft has nothing to lose by conceeding RSS to Firefox. They won't get any new users locked into their approach and existing users want it a certain way.
      • IE still has an enormous bulk of users, but those they've lost are power users and web developers. Web developers, more than anyone, are the ones who have controlled browser success. They're not OSS fanboys, they are the ones that want the best working conditions available. They took IE4 over Netscape 4, and FF over IE6. They have no issue reverting to IE if IE resumes its best-of-category status.

        Not necessarily...many utilize Linux or Mac instead of Windows. There's no IE anymore on the Mac, and Linux d

      • Re:Collaboration? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anthracks ( 532185 )

        As Firefox started gaining momentum, some people (I seem to remember Scott Finney of www.scotsnewsletter.com fame claiming a difference in near-1.0 days) claimed differences

        Not that it's the main point of your post, but the Mozilla Suite and Firefox and even Camino (barring any Mac-specific styling on widgets) should render all pages exactly the same. At least, versions from the same era (like Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 1.0, or the forthcoming SeaMonkey 1.0 and Firefox 1.5). Both programs are built on top of

      • This reminds me of a post someone wrote about user portability being good for getting them to switch to your app, not just from it. The assertion was basically that lots of people switched to Firefox over last year in part because they knew they could switch back if they didn't like it. That makes people more likely to try it out on a test drive basis.

        If a switch is harder to revoke, people tend to be more reluctant to go through with it.

        I've switched browsers a lot. Importing bookmarks is pretty easy.

  • Oh yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by c0l0 ( 826165 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:40PM (#14265946) Homepage
    That's a FAR more important issue than, say, intrepreting W3-standards in one common way amongst all browsers. Really. I'm glad they cooperate in fields that tremendously important.

    • Re:Oh yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:44PM (#14265989) Homepage Journal
      All long walks starts with a modest first step. If this open the door (or at least, gives the hint that is possible) to more/bigger/fundamental collaborations, then is something to be happy about.
    • What makes you think they're not cooperating in other areas?

      In fact, Microsoft is working with the WaSP project to improve standards compliance. Just because there's a story about A doesn't mean B isn't happening.

    • Internet Explorer 7 will have an improved rendering engine. [msdn.com] Most of CSS 2.1 and HTML 4.01 will be supported. The weirder bugs like Peekaboo will be fixed. The PNG alpha channel will finally work.

      It'll still be a long way behind everyone else, but it's a substantial step in the right direction.

    • Perhaps not, but it is a much easier issue to solve.

      I mean, IE and Firefox still disagree over whether to use the term "Favorites" or "Bookmarks." (And didn't IE start out trying to use "shortcuts" instead of "links"?) Opera's finally tumbling to the fact that their "Pages" are everyone else's "Tabs," and plans on tweaking Opera 9 to help unify UI behavior [blogspot.com] across browsers.

  • Great Scott the Inovation is Amazing!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by OneByteOff ( 817710 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:41PM (#14265955)
    In other News, IE 7 will utilize Mozilla's Tabber Browsing, Improved Pop-up Blocker and security model... ... In-house inovation from microsoft includes... um.... um.... An improved looking Blue E. More details to follow.

    • Re:Great Scott the Inovation is Amazing!! (Score:5, Funny)

      by JPyObjC Dude ( 772176 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:47PM (#14266010)
      ... We at MS also would like to introduce the blue screen of happiness! Yes, you can enjoy pictures of flowers comfortable music while you muse on the hours of work you just lost.
    • Wow people. Stop referring to Tabbed Browsing as Mozilla's/Opera's innovation. Neither one of these innovated it. In fact, I find both of their implementaions to be lacking. I've been using NetCaptor for the past eight years, with tabbed browser. No browser to date still supports tabbed browsing as well as it does. I constantly get new windows for FF open when I selected single application. I've tried numerious plugins. They all miss one or two different areas, and most of them don't play nice with

  • In other news. . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:41PM (#14265959) Journal
    sales of down-filled parkas skyrocketed in hell, Israel and Palestine agreed to merge and form one country under UN supervision and evangelical christians in the United States, along with the Vatican, admitted that Christmas should more properly be celebrated sometime in the summer.
    • "sales of down-filled parkas skyrocketed in hell, Israel and Palestine agreed to merge and form one country under UN supervision...."

      Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reportedly wants to label the destination for Unified Palisrael with the name "New West Italy [adnki.com]".

    • Re:In other news. . . (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ross.w ( 87751 )
      Heh, Christmas IS celebrated sometime in the summer(for us). Please don't move it.

  • Helpful hint: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by voice_of_all_reason ( 926702 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:42PM (#14265964)
    Embrace: The company publicly announces that they are going to support a standard. They assign an employee or employees to work with the standards bodies, such as the W3C and the IETF.

    Extend: They do support the standard, at least partially, but start adding company-only extensions of the standard to their products. They argue that they are trying only to add value for their customers, who want them to provide these features.

    Extinguish: Through various means, such as driving use of their extended standard through their server products and developer tools, they increase use of the proprietary extensions to the point that competitors who do not follow the company version of the standard cannot compete. The company standard then becomes the only standard that matters in practical terms (a de facto standard), and it allows the company to control the industry by controlling the standard.

    • Re:Helpful hint: (Score:5, Funny)

      by drew ( 2081 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @05:42PM (#14267646) Homepage
      Yeah, I can see it now. Over time they'll add bits of red and yellow shading to the orange icon. They'll change the level of anti-aliasing a little bit, and maybe slightly adjust the radius of the rounded corners. After a year or two, they'll add drop shadows, and before you know it, no one will regognize the original orange and white icon used in Firefox and Opera and all of the other browsers that agreed to follow Microsoft into this standard. Everyone will be locked into the new and improved Microsoft version.

      Meanwhile, Dave Winer will be somewhere saying "See, I told you that you should have just used an orange rectangle with the letters 'XML'. But would you listen to me? NO! And now Microsoft has gone and emrace-and-extended your precious litle radio icon. I hope you're happy!"

  • Switchers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tiberius_Fel ( 770739 ) <fel AT empirereborn DOT net> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:42PM (#14265971)
    Pessimists will say that it will make it more likely for people to switch back to IE, but for people like my parents, now that they've got Firefox, they really like it and are unlikely to go back. However, switching from one to the other leads inevitably to "what does this symbol mean" here and there - and if that's eliminated, then it makes it even easier for me to move people to firefox, because it's not that radically different from what they used to see.

  • What about innovation? (Score:5, Funny)

    by pivo ( 11957 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:44PM (#14265983)
    I'm worried that conformity in this issue area will reduce competition and stifle innovation.

  • Yay! :) (Score:4, Funny)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `todhsals.nnamredyps'> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:46PM (#14266007) Homepage Journal
    Now could the office teams please agree on a file format?
    Pretty please?
    Pretty please with sugar on top?
    • no no...its much better to protect your data by security through obscurity. If nobody can open your file then your data is safe.

      .
  • And the Mozilla button looks an awful lot like the Engadget logo.

  • I've got it! (Score:3, Funny)

    by jmcmunn ( 307798 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:49PM (#14266036)

    -----
    |RSS|
    -----

    There you go, mock that baby up in photoshop and we're good to go!

  • Could they would they... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by squoozer ( 730327 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:49PM (#14266038)

    I wonder if MS is considering opening IE or possibly even giving up on development of it. While you might fall over laughing at that and think "Oh, just another OSS fan boy" here's my reasoning. There is nothing left to fight for in the browser war. MS used the browser to get Windows on every desktop. They have done that now. They won, so why maintain their weapon (IE). In fact just look at the situation they have got themselves into. They didn't want to maintain IE so for x (7 IIRC) years they have just not really touched it. If FF hadn't come along I doubt they would have ever touched it again. After all, it didn't directly make them any money. What good it did to their bottom line had already been done. Personally, I think this update to IE is an egg on face stopper rather than a real update. Once they have done this update they then have a good two or three years to announce that they will no longer be updating IE. The great thing about that from MS's point of view is that they can abandon IE without loosing face.

    What would be great is if they stopped development of IE and put some effort into FF. After all they are likely to be playing catch up for ever against FF simply because of the way it is developed and released. The only thing that would stop MS from doing this is pride. They won't admit that OSS can actually produce decent software.

    • I think its more like they have gotton a lot of flack from web developers that are complaining that they have to support 2 browsers, IE and everyone else (gecko based browsers, opera, safari, konq). I can write code that works in 'everyone else', but not IE. It should not be that way, and I think people are complaining to MS about it and they are finally listening to the community.

      Besides I can start to code to standards and then tell people sorry MS IE doesn't support standards so you have to get a brow

    • Taking a hill is no good unless you can defend it.

      If MS feels they need to keep there mind share, then they will keep developing it.

      I agree, the way people see the web is done.

    • Re:Could they would they... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by birge ( 866103 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:04PM (#14266186) Homepage
      Your argument assumes that FF is better than IE. For most users, it may not be. And it may not be for anybody whose not a idealogically bound to OSS, or obsessed with tabs.

      Personally, I just uninstalled FF earlier this week after getting fed up with its inability to load pages consistently. For reasons I can't fathom, even with default settings, FF will sometimes hang on pages that don't load fast enough. IE, on the other hand, is very robust in this regard. I miss the tabs, but I really like having pages always come up.

      Yes, I filed a bug report. It was dismissed arrogantly with the statement "millions of people have no problem with FF." I wasn't the only person who filed such a report, either.

      • Have you tried Mozilla instead of FF? You might be suprised at the difference. Mozilla certainly seems to have suffered fewer problems than FF - the whole Slashdot problem from a while back. I never saw that once with Mozilla.

        Cheers,

        Roger

    • Re:Could they would they... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:08PM (#14266217)

      What would be great is if they stopped development of IE and put some effort into FF. After all they are likely to be playing catch up for ever against FF simply because of the way it is developed and released. The only thing that would stop MS from doing this is pride.

      Microsoft have positioned Internet Explorer as a way of writing in-house applications for years. They support all kinds of quirks and non-standard behaviour like HTAs etc that Gecko, KHTML, etc don't have to.

      It's more than pride stopping Microsoft from switching to Gecko; all their big customers who've bought into their marketing and built in-house applications that require this stuff would scream bloody murder if the rug was pulled out from under them.

      In order to let Internet Explorer die, they'd have to transition these customers to something else. The two main contenders are XAML and XUL. XAML isn't quite ready yet, and Microsoft won't undermine it by switching their customers to XUL, will they?

      You have to understand that Longhorn was supposed to be done by now. These customers should already be switching in mass numbers. But Longhorn has been delayed for so long that Microsoft's strategy has hit a roadblock because Internet Explorer isn't cutting the mustard any more, and people are looking at alternatives like XUL.

      • Microsoft have positioned Internet Explorer as a way of writing in-house applications for years.

        IMHO, this is a poor excuse for MS to continue with IE. Their track record, especially with the extra features of their "in-house applications" sucks in terms of security. They were able to create a new programming language (C#) and a new application environment (.NET) with little to no headaches, what would creating a separate "in-house application client" (it could even be IE, without standard web access), an

      • They could intergrate the special features with FF. Problem solved. It gives them a browser that is undergoing constant free updates and backward compatability. They would, of course, have to write a translation layer (a la nVidia) as I am sure they wouldn't open the source of they fancy extensions.

    • Re:Could they would they... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by That's Unpossible! ( 722232 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:19PM (#14266302)
      MS used the browser to get Windows on every desktop. They have done that now. They won, so why maintain their weapon (IE).

      You have this one point completely backwards and so the rest of your argument is moot.

      Windows was already on every desktop when they released IE to compete with Netscape Navigator. They used the fact that Windows was everywhere in order to get *IE* everywhere, not the other way around!

  • Works -For- Firefox, not against it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gavin86 ( 856684 ) <gavin@b@lynch.gmail@com> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @02:55PM (#14266098) Journal
    Consider this if the IE team chose a vastly different icon:

    IE is the dominant browser. The people who are most likely to be using Internet Explorer are also the people who are most likely to not realize that Firefox might have originally created the icon or even care about it.

    All they will see is that when their friends try to switch them to this "newcomer" browser, it uses a different icon and poor old IE user gets confused and don't feel like switching. The less barriers, the less little things that add up, the lower the learning curve for people to switch. While it might not seem like much, these things pile on top of each other for someone who only knows IE as "the internet" and was not previously aware that there is something else out there.
  • While I think this is a 'good thing' for all concerned, I would not be sharing that icon for free. Microsoft should be required to license it from the Moz folks. I'm not talking anything uber-subtantial, but a reasonable donation for the rights to use this icon should be something the parties can figure out together. Sorry, but as an IT Director, I see how much money Microsoft sucks out of my company, and I think it only fair and rational for our friends at Mozilla to benefit from this. Pete
    • Yes, FOSS companies should make people pay licensing fees. Huh?

      It doesn't matter who you're charging fees, it's still against the entire principle of FOSS.

    • Re:Don't Share For Free!!! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:18PM (#14266295)

      That kind of thinking is what annoys me when people say "imagine how much money Tim Berners Lee would have if he'd charged for the WWW instead of giving it away!" It's nonsense. The WWW would never have caught on if it wasn't free.

      And, if Mozilla.org tried to charge Microsoft for the icon, Microsoft would have told them to fuck off, and used their own. I'm pretty sure the world's largest software corporation can come up with one little icon by themselves.

      That way, everyone loses. Microsoft don't get to use the icon they want, Firefox looks more unfamiliar to users coming from Internet Explorer, and the users have a marginally steeper learning curve when they want to switch in either direction.

      The bottom line is that some things are only valuable if they are free. This is one of those times.

  • The increasing collaborative efforts between the browser vendors in the last few weeks is an honest attempt to create a standard Web interface for everyone, no matter what browser is used.

    So, does this mean IE7 will support XUL? Because that'd be really cool. Being able to create rich web apps using XUL would be nice.

    Oh, wait, but if they supported XUL, then no one would need their XAML. So I suppose that's still just a dream...


  • Are you sure it's Mozzilla they're collaborating with? Maybe MS is really branching out and collaborating with this company [mozzco.com].

  • Win-win for Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lord Byron II ( 671689 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:02PM (#14266168)
    Their art department doesn't have to waste time and money developing their own icon and they get credit for "working together".
  • Why stop at the RSS symbol, why not just adopt the entire browser?

    I mean, what is the point in Microsoft having its own web browser when there is a free and open alternative (other than to steer users away from free and open cross-platform standards)?

    • Money. A high market penetration allows them to convince web developers to use stuff like ActiveX etc. more easily, which in turn allows them to sell products to facilitate developing these things.
  • ...so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley...

    A trip....from Washington...to California...for an icon? I wish I could make trips around the country for such trivial purposes.

    How about this instead?

    ----
    From: jane@microsoft.com
    To: john@mozilla.org
    Subject: RSS icon

    You: RSS icon.
    We: Need RSS icon.

    We coo?

    -Jane

    ----
    From: john@mozilla.org
    To: jane@microsoft.com
    Subject: Re: RSS icon

    Sure.

    -John

    ----

    Honestly, 800+ miles to talk about a 28x28 pixel icon. God save their accounting department if they want to collaborate on something like those darn [w3.org] pesky [w3.org] standards [wikipedia.org].

  • Money solves everything (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Starji ( 578920 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:10PM (#14266235)
    Once Microsoft started making web-apps one of their core strategies, browser compatibility immediately came to the forefront. Why? Because they looked at the trends. Eventually, Joe Public will wonder why everyone is using that Firefox thing, and will want to know how they can use it. Microsoft can't sell web-apps effectively, especially to the consumer level, if IE is the only browser that supports them. They would be alienating a huge amount of potential customers (the Mac users, or Linux users, or just windows users tired of IE shooting themselves in the foot), and considering that group is only growing, they must have realized it's just a plain stupid move.

    So in other words, they'll only cooperate insofar as it helps their web-app strategy. Will we see XUL in IE? Nope, because they won't be making anything with XUL, and thus it would only help the competition. There's the trick right there; find a way for microsoft to make money and you'll spur them into action every time.

  • Collaborate or adopt? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:12PM (#14266247)
    You decide.

  • Sounds like a great idea, but Firefox and Mozilla themes usually replace the RSS/Atom/feed icon with something that matches that theme. I mean, I know that IE doesn't support themeing yet (AFAIK), but what's the big deal about having the same icon?

  • In other news, Microsoft (MSFT) reported today that they are boosted earnings estimates by 0.00000000047 cents per share for the current quarter. Chief Financial Officer Christopher Liddell indicated that the earnings boost arises from a reduction in expenses made possible by a collaborative effort with the Mozilla Foundation to create a new standard logo for RSS feeds.

  • It's cool but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Xenious ( 24845 )
    It looks like a singnal strength indicator. In fact (besides being orange) it looks like the icon my weather radio alarm clock thing uses to show atmoic time sync singal. Wtf does the icon have to do with an RSS feed?
  • Some Microsoft developers post a few icons on their blog. Many blog comments express that they like icon #4 (which is what is already used in Mozilla). Icon #4 is adopted. How does this get spun into collaboration? Geez. Granted they 'met' with some folks at Mozilla, but I'm sure only so MS could get 30 pages of legal documents signed to agree they are allowed to use the icon.
    • Icon #4 wasn't Firefox's icon, though it was similar. In particular, all of their test icons [msdn.com] were landscape rectangles, and the broadcast waves in icon #4 were oriented left-to-right. Firefox's icon is square, with the broadcast waves oriented diagonally from lower left to upper right.

      They did state that "The Firefox icon is close, but it lacks the rectangular dimension" (they wanted to match the look of the classic XML and RSS buttons without relying on text).

      What's news here is that they not only recogn

  • This is nuts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Displaced Cajun ( 20400 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @03:24PM (#14266357)
    You know, I wish when I story was rejected, you could see who was the person who rejected it.
    2005-12-15 16:29:46 Standarized RSS Icon For Mozilla and IE 7 (Developers,Mozilla) (rejected)
  • Microsoft trademarks, patents, and copyrights the RSS icon.
  • If I take a quick look on history Microsoft already cooperated with IBM on OS/2 and later with Sun on Java.

    And we all know how these cooperations ended.
  • That is just another thing that microsoft will embrace, extend and extinguish.

    How they going to pull off that one I don know thought ...

    ... incompatible color? ... hum no ...
    ... a proprietary bit in each pixel? ... hum ...

    well I'm sure they're gonna find a way ...

  • It's 1997 all over again.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:04PM (#14268305) Homepage
    When pressed, IE developers admitted that this might not end with RSS icons. "We just have trouble coming up with any ideas of our own period," they were quoted as saying. "Yesterday it was tabbed browsing, today it's an RSS icon.. who knows, maybe one day we'll implement stability."

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