Icons: It’s still orange
My last post shared some of our conceptual designs of the feed icon and expressed some of the criteria that we are using to select the right icon. Several of the comments liked icon #4 simply because it looked liked the Firefox icon, and many (like this one) suggested that we work with the Firefox team to standardize on an icon.
This seemed like a very good idea, so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley to meet with John Lilly and Chris Beard from Mozilla to get their thoughts on it. We 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. And the winner is…
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. Look for more details on the look and feel of IE7 when we post the public pre-release build next year.
Thanks again to the Mozilla team for making the icon available and helping us do the right thing for all browser users. Many thanks to everyone who gave feedback on our earlier post; your comments and thoughts were very valuable!
- Jane
Update 12/15: The Outlook 12 team has announced they'll be using the same icon. Great news!
Feed icon used
Jane Kim, the program manager for RSS in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, announced recently that her team had chosen a graphical representation of Web syndication feeds — one popularized by its competitor. Microsoft employees have been posting variations of conceptual designs since earlier this year, but have now announced that they chose an icon used by the rival browser, Mozilla Firefox. The Microsoft team collaborated with Mozilla staff during the selection process.

"I'm excited to announce that we're adopting the icon used in Firefox," wrote Kim. "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." 

Microsoft is poised to release IE7 with many of the new features popularized in Firefox, such as browser tabs, feed support, full PNG and CSS support, and other improvements.