Microsoft to use Firefox rss icon
p2p news / p2pnet: Is it a genuine symbol of co-operation as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer suggests, or is it a ploy of some kind? Because when Bill and the Boyz start making concessions, you have to wonder what’s behind it.
Firefox users see the small orange icon on the right when they’ve landed on a page which offers an RSS feed. It means they can bookmark the site and subscribe to it.
“Microsoft worked out an arrangement to use the same symbol that Firefox does to alert people when a Web page makes extra streams of information available for subscription,” says the story, going on:
“The industry has seen bigger deals, to put it mildly. In fact, describing it as a deal might be a stretch. It was an informal agreement, with no money changing hands, said Sean Lyndersay, lead program manager on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team.
“But the mere idea that the two camps were talking caused a stir – with some analysts wondering whether they might be capable of reaching consensus on more weighty matters, such as standards for the way Web pages are made and displayed.”
Further cooperation on both sides? Could be.
It’s also a PR stunt under which Microsoft, which has lost a significant share of the browser market to Mozilla’s Firefox, gets to look like a good guy, metaphorically speaking,
“As much as people like to think that this is some sort of war, it’s not really,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has Lyndersay. ” Working out an arrangement with Mozilla to use the Firefox icon for online feeds ‘drives that point home very clearly, he said.
It does nothing of the kind, of course.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Microsoft, Mozilla: A symbol of cooperation?, December 19, 2005
December 19th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
You mean people still use IE ? How unfortunate for them.
December 19th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
I just switched Back to IE. I downloaded FireFox 1.5 and tried to use it.
I was OK with it until I tried copy a few lines of text from a web page and past it into a new message window in M$ Outlook. What happened instead of the lines I copied appearing was that I got a URL as an attachment.
I figured that I would simply revert back to 1.0.7 . Wrong!!! I could not find a link to earlier versions. As much as I hate using I.E., I do need a browser that will allow me to copy and paste text into other applications.
December 20th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
> … I tried copy a few lines of text from a web page and
> past[e] it into a new message window in M$ Outlook.
> What happened instead of the lines I copied appearing
> was that I got a URL as an attachment. …
That’s a really silly reason to switch to Internet Explorer. I think you should investigate the reason for this, including the possibility that some SpyWare may have messed up your system to cause this behaviour. You should also try pasting that text into other applications such as Windows Notepad, Corel’s WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org’s Text Editor, etc., and if the problem doesn’t occur there then you’ll know it’s a problem specific to MS-OutLook (and you’ll need to ask Microsoft to fix it — they’re the leaders in the industry at this, obviously evident by the massive numbers of updates they release so often).
The only thing I ever use Internet Explorer for is Windows Updates, and testing the web sites I build/modify to ensure that nothing strange is going to happen (this is usually only an issue when using fancy JavaScript code, basic CSS, or complicated HTML tables).
Unfortunately I’m not very pleased with Mozilla as of late because Netscape is using Internet Explorer APIs to render certain web pages — get with the program folks, don’t you understand that the main reason people don’t want to use Internet Explorer is because they don’t want applications to install automatically without their consent? Now that Microsoft is making “arrangements” with Mozilla/Firefox to share icons, I’m left suspicously wondering “What’s next?”
I use Opera for all my web browsing. Version 8.5 is free (without banner ads), and I find that it generally renders web pages faster than Netscape, Mozilla/Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Most importantly, however, like Mozilla’s Firefox it’s not riddled with security holes, some of which were probably design flaws due to facilitating automatic updates to the underlying Operating System (I firmly believe that the Windows Updates should be a stand-alone application and not be part of a web browser).
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Randolf Richardson – randolf@inter-corporate.com
Inter-Corporate Computer & Network Services, Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
http://www.inter-corporate.com/