There is a ridiculous fuss over MS’s plans to create their own RSS icon deviating from the orange box that says XML in white. Oh the horror!! sheesh. Did everyone forget that Firefox has already done this?

Here are the icons Microsoft is looking at.

What is the big deal. Dwight Silverman, a reporter and blogger with the Houston Chronicle, pointed out that Mozilla changed both the name for RSS feeds (to Live Bookmarks) and the icon (square orange broadcast symbol) on its Firefox browser with no outrage.

Firefox has already changed the icon for RSS from what has become the standard XML feed or RSS feed icon (white text on orange). They have already changed the name to “Live Boomarks” which is far removed from RSS feed. But it’s Microsoft who caught some flak for wanting to change the word RSS to something like, “Web Feeds” which is a heck of a lot closer to RSS than mozillas, “live bookmarks”.

So why does everyone pick on Microsoft? It’s really quite pathetic to be against something just because it’s the popular thing to do, which I do believe, from my own experiences in IT working around MS haters, is the main reason people are so rabidly and blindly anti-Microsoft, but I could write a book on that so I shall digress.

I like the way the new IE 7 will handle RSS feed display when you click to view a feed. Check out the images on this link. This should have been done long ago by every browser.

When you click on a link to a web feed in IE 6 today you’ll see a very colorful, but ultimately not very useful view of the feed. With IE 7, we detect when a page is really a web feed, and we display a view of the feed that’s much easier to read. You can even add the web feed as a favorite for quick access, right from the page.

Firefox has the icon that shows a live feed exists and also "live bookmarks" feature and I like those a lot. IE 7 will have that and more so I am looking forward to it.

Another feature that looks to get a bit of an update in IE 7 are favorites or bookmarks. They look to be working on a better interface to manage bookmarks. That is long overdue because managing bookmarks has been horrible across the board in EVERY browser.