Internet Explorer 7, due in about four months' time, is to support RSS feeds – some of which may have Microsoft 'enhancements' (ie proprietary extensions). Following a competition to design a new RSS icon to appear in IE7 whenever a site supports RSS feeds, Microsoft has decided… to use Mozilla's:
It's an odd choice: I don't find the icon used by Mozilla and Firefox to be at all self-explanatory – certainly not compared with Safari's:
What does the Firefox icon actually look like? “Radar site nearby”? “Darts board available”? It doesn't look like an RSS feed, a news feed or anything else that's remotely newsy or time-related. So unless you know that's the RSS feed icon already, you'll never know what it's supposed to mean or be able to work it out. Sure, you also have to know what RSS means with the Safari icon to understand its purpose, but that's easy to find out: you can Google RSS and get good results but someone's going to have to do a lot of SEO work to get “yellow radar picture” to show up at the top of the current Google search list. Please don't suggest that people could use the Help pages. Like that's ever going to happen.
But the adoption of the Mozilla icon is at least in keeping with the cooperation between browser vendors that has been occurring of late. It just makes me wonder what Microsoft's plans will be later on. Given the history of Microsoft, the Internet and Internet Explorer (MS notes it's been lagging on the Internet, uses someone else's tech to catch up, then uses its desktop monopoly and proprietary extensions to edge out competitors), all this does have an eerily familiar ring to it. Is MS pretending to be a good neighbour so that it can borrow other developers' tech without opprobrium? Or is it genuinely trying to play nice?
If the latter, after all the fuss and court cases over anti-competitive practices against Netscape, why is it even bothering to update IE with new features? Couldn't it just fix the massive number of bugs in IE and leave it at that, rather than adding things like tabbed browsing and RSS feeds, which are clearly designed to recapture market share from other browsers? I guess you could put it down to a certain degree of pride at MS in not producing (what it thinks is) an inferior product. But that's never stopped them before...
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I agree, I had similar thoughts. The Firefox RSS logo is a nice image, but not particularly good design.