Slashdot Mirror
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'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.
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.
Come on, it's a damn icon! 28x28 pixels, thats it. Don't too read much into it.
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.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
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."
How is that a double standard? They didn't patch it to break the DRM, they patched it because it broke their OS.
...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