The IE 7 development team has announced that the RSS icon in IE 7 will be the same as that currently being used in Firefox:



This is agood move and wil be welcomed by one and all. It shows that MS and the newer devs there are at least thinking about collaboration when it comes to establishing world-wide standards.

This isn't the first time too,according to the post and the result will only be better for end-users.

nice to see that people from Redmond finally making some smart moves.

Indeed. This is unheard of....Microsoft conforming to a standard? Think about it....I'm not sure if the world is ready for it!

Yea it's a slight glimmer of hope It'd be good to see more standards, while most of us youth find technology to be second nature, it's already hard enough for older people to get accustomed to new tech without certain companies making pointless variations on things (such as icons) just to be independant and use proprietary everything. Good move M$

What's the big deal about it? I mean, it's just an icon, not exactly a major standardisation of Javascript or CSS or anything.

Wright now i am using IE7Beta2 it is much more similar to Firefox that it seems... Anyway, I think the days of Microsoft's monopoly are soonly over

It may be one of the first, of many upcoming changes, who knows? It's quite a major improvement when Microsoft doesn't steal something, create a new name and logo, and put in their ads, as usual.

i think this is a good move, i makes sure that everyone knows what RSS stands for and it can be recognized by anyone!

most websites use it already so it would be rather stupid by Microsoft to not use it!

-jimmy

I agree with abhiram, I don't really think this whole IE adopting the same icon thing is that big of a deal. I also don't think an icon really explains things that well. People who are entirely unfamiliar with RSS are not going to have any idea why there's an orange little icon there. Those same people would probably benefit more if the RSS icon had some explanations to it, or else they'll probably just ignore the feature like everyone else.

And remember that most of the people who do upgrade to IE7 are probably using IE6 right now. They probably haven't used other browsers such as Firefox and therefore were not exposed to this RSS standard of orange icons. Without them being exposed to something already, adapting to something new really isn't a problem. Starting from point zero is easier than moving from point ten to zero and then moving back.

Of course, for those of used to the orange RSS icon, having it in IE would be quite nice. But there is no difference made for those who have never seen it before.