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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."
I hope MS adopt other features. IE will only get better through competing with a stronger player.
Why UNIX?
that competition between standards were good.
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.
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.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
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.
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
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.
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
I'm worried that conformity in this issue area will reduce competition and stifle innovation.
Now could the office teams please agree on a file format?
Pretty please?
Pretty please with sugar on top?
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.
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
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.
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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
...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.
:wq
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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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!
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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)
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work. --John G. Pollard
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.