IE And Mozz Collaborate On RSS Icon

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."

Comments

Good

[eneville]

I hope MS adopt other features. IE will only get better through competing with a stronger player.

Re:Good

[vishbar]

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

[shobadobs]

Mod parent off-topic, please. Parent has nothing to do with grand-parent; he is butting in up top for visibility.

Re:Good

[Call Me Black Cloud]

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

[TerminalInsanity]

Semantics! It's actualy more of a news portal site. Also, Why do i give two shits what the RSS icon is supposed to look like? I mean, its nice that they want to get allong and everything, but shouldnt they be worried about other things?
And with all of the popularity for themes and customization, why are they working to make a single interface for all the browsers?
What they should be doing, is working with eachother to get each website to render the same...

Anyways, on to more important things... shall i use IE or FF... I do like IE's blue back button...

Re:Good

[NickFitz]

call me when they cooperate on something functional

What sort of thing? Stuff like

• Support for alpha channel transparency in PNG?
• Fixing their support for CSS 2?
• Improving support for HTTPS?
• Improvements in caching and decompression?
• Implementing developer tools?
• Improving the user interface for secure browsing?
• Collaborating with the Web Standards Project to improve Microsoft products?

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 (Atom 0.3).

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

Re:Good

[TheRaven64]

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

[_xeno_]

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

[IAmTheDave]

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 parent post, as should just about everyone. Years of letting IE slide suck, but if they've admitted (in actions) that they needed to get up to snuff and have taken steps to do so, well, give 'em just a little love - whether they improve things out of love for the customer or fear of losing them doesn't really matter much.

Re:Good

[slashrogue]

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

[Eil]

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 actually trying to take IE7 in the direction of a really decent web browser rather than just another tool to monopolize the desktop. If the result of this cooperation is that IE7 turns out to be a halfway decent browser, I might not be quite so adamant that all my friends and family use Firefox exclusively in the future. The one thing I'm still waiting to hear on is actual web standards compliance.

Third, how do you know for sure that an RSS icon is all they talked about? The icon is probably the only thing they decided on for sure. We don't know what issues they might have been discussing tentatively, but there must have been a lot more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This meeting opens the door for future collaboration.

Re:Good

[vishbar]

Firstly, when I replied to that comment, it hadn't been moderated. My response WAS on-topic: the parent (of the original post) mentioned cooperating with other browsers, and I proposed that the adoption of Firefox's RSS icon wasn't a great change in policy. I apologize if I wasn't clear enough in my original post.

You raise a good point in the second post though, something that I obviously didn't think about. By adopting Firefox's icon, they do lend Firefox a sense of credibility. Hopefully, they'll take the same attitude toward, as you said, web standards.

Your third point may be true as well. According to TFA:

I'm excited to announce that we're 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 isn't the first time that we've worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we're sure it won't be the last.

One thing I'd really like to see RSS-wise in IE-7 is the Live Bookmark feaure from Firefox.

Honestly, I've got high hopes for IE7. As much as it pains me to say it, it looks to be shaping up to be a damn nice browser. Now if they'd just stick Acid2 complience in there....

Re:Good

[Seumas]

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

[lpangelrob]

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, development on IE 7 is going at a rapid pace...), does that mean Firefox's purpose would be fulfilled?

In the broader scheme of things, I wonder what development process works better -- somewhat disorganized by design (having read the flamewars about GNOME vs. KDE, this has been part of the backdrop of that whole debate), or PHB's and private corporations? Does the development process have anything to do with the finished product?

Anyways, those have just been a few thoughts of mine in the past week. Feel free to critique.

Re:Good

[God'sDuck]

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?

simple: those who would be confused have never heard of Opera, Netscape, Firefox or Mozilla, and think "MSIE" is named "The Internet."

Re:Good

[kermitthefrog917]

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

[shaitand]

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

[drinkypoo]

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

[labratuk]

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.

Re:Good

[Aqua OS X]

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.

And here I thought

[spurtle15]

that competition between standards were good.

Re:And here I thought

[jasen666]

How is that a double standard? They didn't patch it to break the DRM, they patched it because it broke their OS.

Re:And here I thought

[TerminalInsanity]

Its funny... ms gets bashed no matter what it does. If MS left it unpatched, there would have been an article about that. With comments crying 'MS and Sony are paying each other off blah blah blah DRM blah'

Collaboration?

[ral315]

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?

[Lisandro]

Come on, it's a damn icon! 28x28 pixels, thats it. Don't too read much into it.

Re:Collaboration?

[ral315]

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?

[Alternate Interior]

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.

Re:Collaboration?

[Anthracks]

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 the Gecko rendering engine, it's mainly the user-facing code like the GUI and extension mechanisms that would be different. I'd be interested to see any site that renders differently in two programs based on the same revision of Gecko.

Oh yeah!

[c0l0]

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!

[gmuslera]

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.

Re:I propose...

[rmsmith]

You're just jealous.

Great Scott the Inovation is Amazing!!

[OneByteOff]

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!!

[JPyObjC Dude]

... 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.

Re:Great Scott the Inovation is Amazing!!

[Techster]

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 each other. BTW, NetCaptor also had a popup blocker (that worked) and URL blocking (Ad Blocking) long before FF was publically released. It also blocked most of the exploits in IE that MS left open for months. Yeah, so it's not free to get rid of the small ads that appear occasionally, but it was money well spent in my eyes.

Re:Great Scott the Inovation is Amazing!!

[cens0r]

you do know that you can open things in a new window or a new tab. Depending on the site, I do both. I like to have the choice. What reason could you possibly have to be against tabbed browsing as long as they let you open things in a new window as well?

In other news. . .

[smooth wombat]

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.

Re:In other news. . .

[ross.w]

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

Helpful hint:

[voice_of_all_reason]

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:

[drew]

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

[Tiberius_Fel]

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?

[pivo]

I'm worried that conformity in this issue area will reduce competition and stifle innovation.

Yay! :)

[Spy der Mann]

Now could the office teams please agree on a file format?
Pretty please?
Pretty please with sugar on top?

I've got it!

[jmcmunn]

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

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

Could they would they...

[squoozer]

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.

Re:Could they would they...

[birge]

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.

Re:Could they would they...

[Bogtha]

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.

Re:Could they would they...

[That's Unpossible!]

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!

Re:Could they would they...

[birge]

Perhaps you should think about who it is that is stuck in 'obsession'.

Woah. I love tabs. I just don't like them blank.

Was it a firefox issue? Did you test the same sites with firefox on other machines?

Of course it's a Firefox issue. That's self evident if you drop your defensive knee-jerking for a minute. If you install software and it doesn't work, it is, by definition, that software that is the problem. Perhaps it's understandable that FF has problems given the sorry nature of Windows networking, but that doesn't change the fact that I, and others, have had problems with Firefox on machines where IE works fine. Part of writing software is working around problems with the OS you're targeting. Everybody knows that but OSS people, who regularly project their faults on the OS in lieu of QC. The bottom line is IE works on every machine I have, but FF has occasional problems on most every machine I use, from linux to windows.

It seems like you have a nasty habit of externalizing your own character flaws into the outside world.

Damn. You're either the world's greatest psychologist or the worst hypocrite. You may be projecting the projecting, chief. I just uninstalled it. You're psychoanalysing it. Which one of us has the issue? I don't care that FF sucked for me. I have nothing invested in OSS or commericial software. I was just telling what happened to me. However, I do appreciate it every time somebody from /. decides to read my fortune from one paragraph I write about a fucking html browser. Listen: not everybody has their identity caught up in the software they choose to use. So when I insult the guys who spend countless hours developing FF without compensation and only manage to produce something of comparable bloatness and bugginess to IE, I mention this fact with a detachment that is probably hard for some people here to understand. Don't mistake the extremity of my position for passion about the cause. I really don't care if FF fails or succeeds. I do, however, find mild amusement in calling BS when I see it. And the idea that FF is god's answer to the browser is wrong both in premise and in fact.

I suggested the FF guys were arrogant not because I'm sure I'm right, but because they didn't even bother to find out either way. No respectable company would act that way. There were more than a few of us who were submitting bugs about pages not loading, and we were all dismissed out of hand since there are, evidently, millions of downloads without problems. Intellectually honest developers would at least be curious about the issue. The FF guys were almost reactionary with their dismissal. I thought I was helping them with their project, but I was treated like a guy taking a shit in the middle of a party. It was pretty enlightening to me about their mindset, and I thought it would be interesting for people here. Or at least the ones with some objectivity left.

Anyway, this only makes me arrogant if I'm wrong. And it only makes me obsessed if I think about this for more than a minute after hitting "submit." And believe me, I don't. I argue about software for the same reason most people argue about sports. It fun to do when there's nothing else to do.

Re:Um...Safari?

[ceejayoz]

A blue "RSS" is only clear to the user if they know what RSS means, and probably 95%+ of Internet users don't.

The orange has become something of a de-facto standard, and the icon Firefox and IE are going to use has the advantage of working just fine for non-english users and no flamewar between the "XML", "RSS", and "FEED" camps.

Works -For- Firefox, not against it

[Gavin86]

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.

Re:Um...Safari?

[Kelson]

On the other hand, why should an Atom feed have an RSS icon? The problem with using "RSS" as the label is that it's an implementation detail, not a functional description. It's just like referring to Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. as "web browsers" rather than "HTML viewers." One describes the function, the other describes the implementation -- which could change (say, by using XML+XSLT instead of HTML+CSS).

FWIW, Opera uses a similar icon to Safari - a white "RSS" on a blue background.

Don't Share For Free!!!

[QAPete]

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

Re:Don't Share For Free!!!

[Bogtha]

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.

Win-win for Microsoft

[Lord Byron II]

Their art department doesn't have to waste time and money developing their own icon and they get credit for "working together".

They took a trip to talk about an icon?

[MasterC]

...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 pesky standards.

Re:They took a trip to talk about an icon?

[generic-man]

From: jane@microsoft.com
To: john@mozilla.org
Subject: RE: Re: RSS Icon

Thanks!

This message is for the named person's use only. It may contain confidential, proprietary or legally privileged information. No confidentiality or privilege is waived or lost by any mistransmission. If you receive this message in error, please immediately delete it and all copies of it from your system, destroy any hard copies of it and notify the sender. You must not, directly or indirectly, use, disclose, distribute, print, or copy any part of this message if you are not the intended recipient. Microsoft and each of its subsidiaries each reserve the right to monitor all e-mail communications through its networks. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the message states otherwise and the sender is authorised to state them to be the views of any such entity. Unless otherwise stated, any pricing information given in this message is indicative only, is subject to change and does not constitute an offer to deal at any price quoted. Any reference to the terms of executed transactions should be treated as preliminary only and subject to our formal written confirmation.

--- Original Message ---

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

Sure.

-John

Money solves everything

[Starji]

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?

[digitaldc]

You decide.

It's cool but...

[Xenious]

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?

This is nuts

[Displaced Cajun]

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)

Never ever trust in Microsoft

[balazsa]

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.

embrace, extend and extinguish

[McGiraf]

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..

[StikyPad]

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."