Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Opera had the icon first, Firefox copied it and IE7 will be using an inferior version of it.

Woah- sorry about that- I was suddenly possessed by a troll!

On a serious note, how long before Safari also adopts the icon?

I'm also interested in hearing peoples thoughts on the colour of the icon? Is it recognisable enough that different colours could be used?

What about Safari though? Don't they also use a blue "RSS"?

On a side note - that DS Opera announcement was a bit of a surprise, mainly because it's competition for Sony's browser which I've heard is awful (but correct me if I'm wrong).

Opera is working with Sony for the PSP browser, if that's what you mean, ant.

And yes, this uniformity is good news for the web at large!

I've been looking at some of the reaction on the Opera forums and related blogs. It's pretty mixed. Some people like the idea, some don't like it because it's from Firefox, and some don't like it on the grounds of the icon itself -- probably the same criticisms that went on in the Firefox community as it was being developed.

Personally I'm glad three of the big four will use the same icon for feeds. As just about every proponent of it has said, it's all about ease of discovery.

Yeah, the icon isn't perfect -- if you don't know it's a feed, you can just as easily interpret it as sound volume or a wireless signal -- but it has other advantages over a rectangle that says "RSS." In particular it avoids referring to an implementation (RSS? What about other syndication formats?) instead of the concept (using a broadcast metaphor).

Next battleground: color. No, seriously, I've seen people object to it on the grounds that it's orange. Fortunately feedicons.com has already done the work of converting it. (Incidentally, anyone reading this who wants to use the icon on their website for their own feed links should check that site out. They've got multiple sizes, colors, and scalable vector versions of the icon.)

I doubt Apple will adopt the icon on grounds of color and perhaps icon design consistency. Good to see Opera on board though.

A. Hogan: No, I believe Ant was indeed talking about the DS, not the PSP:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4719570.stm

This is good news for everyone!

With the colour, the RSS icons have always been orange except by the off chance where someone decided to change it. I like orange, however in a user interface perspective orange can stand out. If you look at UIs today, prominent colours are blue, green and yellow. Orange can easily stand out, and you don't want certain icons to yell out to the user. It reminds me of the "Do not touch" big red button. Especially these days since the icon doesn't show up a menu any more unless there is more than one type of feed. There is nothing really to explain it anymore, didn't Fx 1.0.x have a little "About Live Bookmarks" menu option before? It may seem a bit confusing to users when you have a dialog box pop up saying "Add Live Bookmark" (looking exactly like the "Add Bookmark" dialog) immediately when clicking it. I think the Add Live Bookmark dialog should have a nice little bit of explination. Do you think this would be a good recommendation to put forward to Bugzilla?

Meanwhile, with Opera as the Ninty DS browser: why? I thought Nintendo was pretty upfront about having it a gaming only device. I guess they are afraid of the PSP, mwahahaha. And yes, the PSP browser is shocking, mainly control wise though :(

My 2 cents or 3:
A. The webpages indicating they have a RSS(blue)/XML(orange) feed will for 'identification' reasons continue to use a blue/orange RSS button! Conciously, i've only seen Neowin adopting the icon....its orange, so are we getting RSS or XML? Activewin has no icons at all
B. When arriving at FFX/IE/Opera having created a feed link, this RSS icon becomes the what i still think to be some sort of a wireless emission symbol. Wbpage adoption is going to be a long long way.
C. Many pages often times show the symbol of B. in the FFX addressbar, yet no RSS link to be found on the page with old or new icon????
D. There used to be a RSS feed icon on the status bar whenever there was a feed. Clicking on it would list the RSS feeds, which one could then set the link up. What happened?
E. BUT, all the boasting aside, FFX should start talking to the Theme contributors first...use e.g. Aquatint or NOIA Extreme and you get ....well what is it icon in the adressbar. Using SaFire you get well the Blue RSS again.....

ciao

What are you bragging about Asa. Because someone adopten AN ICON? Good for them... it hardly makes a difference. I would rather like to see Firefox falling in Opera's line: no memory leaks, no security holes and the speeeed! It would be good for all of us.

@Poop
“Negative criticism is the act of being too damn lazy to take action and do something productive”
So it’s just an icon, but Firefox is showing its influence in many areas, the icon just adds to the list.

It's good news indeed but I must note that the adoption is for opera.com so far while its inclusion in the browser is still been evaluated. Regarding the color I think it's important to keep it orange because it is a noticeable color since it's not a very common color used in any (major) browser interface, and at least at this moment it is the same color still used in those RSS, RDF, and XML buttons around.

Also, color may have additional meanings while still referring to the web feed, as mentioned at mozillalinks.org, like an already subscribed to feed or new content availability.

@percy: Actually, they are adding the icon to the browser. It'll go into the next weekly build (something they just started this week).

@sekerob: The feed icon on Firefox has just moved from the status bar to the right edge of the address bar. Just click on it, and an "Add Live Bookmark" box will come up. As for when the icon appears, it's a matter of whether Firefox detects a feed link on the page. If the page author doesn't use an icon on the page itself, Firefox (and other browsers) can often still detect the feed and provide a button to subscribe in their own UI.

@kelson: Well we know that by Moz's own announcement it moved to the address bar, which is when it stopped working entirely!!!!!!!!! AND i've at times in despair converted pages to see where RSS/XML was hiding...well there is't at times!!!!!!! So: 1. The Adress bar indicator for RSS does not work as i now know 2. Gives at times fake information, like this very page !!!!!!!

Why did the feed icon in Firefox get moved from the status bar to the address bar? Is this an example of Firefox 'falling into line' behind Safari and Opera, or did those browser makers know in advance that Firefox was going to do it all along (and subsequently copied what Firefox was going to do?)

Yes, I think this 'falling into line' language is a little silly. It is a good thing, however, that browser makers are agreeing to use the same conventions.

@sekerob: What are you talking about? It works fine. Single-left click on that icon. A box should come up offering to create a live bookmark.

As for where it came up with it: If you look at the code for this page, you'll see the following line in the <head> section:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/index.rdf" />

That tells Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7, and any of a zillion feed readers that http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/index.rdf is a feed associated with this page. It's not "fake information," it's right there in the HTML.

This scheme was first(?) described in 2002 on Dive Into Mark (don't miss the follow-up post with some changes). The basics are: Put a <link> element in the head with re="alternate" and type="application/rss+xml" or type="application/atom+xml" (as appropriate).

@sekerob and Kelson: The RSS feed icon shows up when the author has explicitly declared it in the header of the page. This is becoming increasingly popular practice, however some sites still do not do it, hence the icon not showing when the page itself advertises the fact. So, in other words Fx doesn't use links on the page to pick up this fact.

@sekerob: First, where have you seen blue RSS icons? Everywhere else has them orange. Secondly, on your second point in your second post what did you mean by "converted pages to see where RSS/XML was hiding... well there is't at times"? One thing I can think of for your Live Bookmark icon not to work is that you may have an extension such as Livelines which takes over the actions that it does. However, the default behaviour for it is to only show the Add Live Bookmark dialog when there is only one feed, and show the menu when there are many.

It's good to see that Firefox is falling into line behind Opera. Most of the new features in 1.5 were taken directly from Opera, after all, and 2.0 follows the same pattern. Sessions? Opera pioneered those.

@Daniel and sekerob: I posted a description of the auto-discovery mechanism a couple of hours ago, but it's stuck in moderation. I think it got caught because I used too many links (I linked to both Dive Into Mark posts that codified the practice and included some sample HTML with a full URL). I gave the example of this page, which does indeed have the autodiscovery code in the <head> section describing an associated feed even though there's no link to a feed in the page body.

@Daniel: It's getting funny....last sentence of first post. Load the SaFire theme and reload this page...you get a RSS in blue in addressbar (artistic liberty maybe) and there is still no RSS feed to be found.....speculating could it be like you say the siteheader invoking this icon to show.....then if think the functionality is flunky.....and I did not know that FFx followed the Opera....many extensions like 2 panel bookmarks already do an excellent job to amelgamate the good features into ffx. I've got Wizz RSS News Reader installed, that never interfered with the RSS icon whilst it was still in the status bar.

YAY!

Daniel, blue RSS icons can be found, among other places, at versiontracker.com (down at the bottom). They used to be everywhere; these days I simply tune out all the variations, so maybe they still are as ubiquitous as the orange XML icons.

Are you bragging about an icon? Seriously...?

Fall into line, masses!

Just a question, this entry was posted as a joke, right?. You won´t tell me that you are bragging about a feeds icon, will you?. You are not particularly known for your sense of humor...

The icon sucks anwyays, what are you trying to prove with a fancy gradient effect on an icon that's supposed to portray a standard protocol?

Talk about falling in line...Firefox fell in line Behind Opera in implementing tabs.

Opera is certainly on the rise and firefox can better start watching out...Opera already owns minimo in the mobile market..and same is about to follow suit on the desktop. Opera 9 is looking really really good, no memory leaks and doesn't feel like using a product made out of a bunch of loosely stapled papers. Also the DS has announced Opera for it...things are looking awesome for Opera!

In Opera you can change the RSS icon. I use a standalone feed reader's icon. The orange "wireless connection" icon is adopted for dummies.
Create a browser without memory leaks and overall slow performance instead of swearing at Opera. Firefuck fanboys love their browser, that's pathetic.
We like our browser, 'cause it's fast (!), stable, clean and comfortable out of the box. It has an integrated email client, IRC, feed reader, but it isn't bloated, because these features need 200KB and only 1 item in the menu. Firefox + Thunderbird combo is bloated, install the Gecko engine 2 too many times.
Quake4 needs less memory, cpu, etc than Firefox.

I can only smile....just have a look at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox

What RSS icon do you see today....wireless or rss? Default or Safire or Noia theme...does not matter |>)