It may only be a small victory, in that only those who know its origins will realise, but the RSS logo first seen in Mozilla's Firefox web browser will be taken onboard by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.
While we often see Firefox and other 3rd party browsers as enemies of Internet Explorer, trying to claw away some of Microsoft's web browser dominance, it seems in the case of the IE7 team finding an RSS icon, they chose to cooperate with the Mozilla Corporation and go for something already out there and familiar to current RSS users. Jane from the Microsoft Team posted in their RSS blog the following about the decision:
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.
We’ll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we’ll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds.
RSS continues to grow in popularity, only helped further as more browsers and websites introduce support for it. Indeed, HEXUS has its own RSS feeds, which if your browser is RSS aware, will be accessible from the sites main channels, giving you a list of recent news entries for that respective channel.
With MS taking onboard the new logo, Mozilla may well have a smile on their faces, but will the release of IE7 result in the demise of Firefox? It depends, perhaps, on both loyalty and security. There will always be a core of Firefox users (particularly the Linux crew) who will stick with it through thick and thin. However, some may well convert back, providing their faith in the security of Internet Explorer is restored, and IE7 has enough features to give Firefox a run for its money (how do you give a free product a run for its money, anyway?)
