14 DAY TRIAL // What a big impact a tiny little icon can have on the world of technology. Microsoft has adopted a new idea of using the same Firefox symbol that alerts people when a Web page makes extra streams of information available for subscription.
Sean Lyndersay, lead program manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team said that calling it a deal might be something of a stretch. It was an informal agreement, with no money changing hands, but an agreement nonetheless.
"As much as people like to think that this is some sort of war, it's not really." This little arrangement to use the Firefox icon for online feeds "drives that point home very clearly," he added. The idea came to Microsoft Corp. when they were putting together material on IE7, the next generation of the IE. Microsoft had also been thinking it might be good to adopt an existing icon from another browser, Lyndersay said.
John Lilly, Mozilla's vice president of business development, and Chris Beard, Mozilla's vice president of marketing met with Jane Kim and Amar Gandhi, an Internet Explorer group program manager and discussed the idea that having multiple icons representing the same thing in different browsers can foster confusion. "I think it's in everybody's interest for people to understand what feeds are and where they exist? It was a pretty easy call to say, 'This is better for users'," Lilly said last week.
Since this hopefully won't be the last time the two companies talk, maybe it's a sign of a unified standards for the way Web pages are made and displayed. New partnerships are always looming around the corner.