The folks that make the Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer web browsers have agreed on a standard feed icon to represent the loveliness that is both RSS and Atom (and whatever they may evolve into in the years ahead). The winner? The orange and white icon Firefox users have been enjoying for quite a while.

As a result, it’s a reasonable idea to start changing the feed icons on our sites so that feeds become something more easily recognized.

Matt Brett smartly set up a site where you can grab a zip file chock full of feed icon goodness including the new icon in ready to use formats such as png, gif and jpg as well as edit friendly formats such as psd and svg. So, what are you waiting for? Nerds and designers, grab yourself a new icon.

Feed Icons – Help Establish a New Standard

Zeldman, whom I very much admire for his book Designing With Web Standards, seems to have a left a very bad example for the rest of the web development community when it comes to Internet Explorer 7 beta.

What’s he doing exactly? He’s concerning himself with incompatibilities between his site and IE7 beta.

If you’re wondering if you should be doing the same, testing your existing sites with this beta, in a word, don’t. The next beta will obviously improve upon the last beta as will the final release that comes some time after that (and the service packs and bug fixes that come after that) and if you spend your time looking for incompatibilities between now and then, you’ll be wasting a lot of time chasing a moving target. When it gets close to final release, you’ll know it’s time to check out how it fair with standards-happy code. (Just look for the multiple stories on Digg.) In the meantime, isn’t that time better spent getting real work done? What about that novel you’re always talking about writing?

If you do like this sort of compatibility exploration, why not delve into the next line of web standards we are looking forward to, like real implementations of CSS3 and SVG support? Exploring standards compatibility for your code is certainly a more healthy exercise than exploring IE7′s beta foibles.

Internet Explorer 7 is Not a Community Project

The other mistake Zeldman seems to be making and encourage others to join an unpaid test team for Microsoft.

Using IE7? Finding bugs? Microsoft and The Web Standards Project want to hear from you.

Microsoft has no shortage of money to hire oodles of testers and shouldn’t need your help in squashing their bugs. Remember, this isn’t Firefox. If you spend your time bug hunting with IE7 and the time to write up a bug report to Microsoft, you’re simply helping them make more money without paying you for your work. (Note that if they somehow rewarding people for finding these problems, that would make a little more sense to me.) If you do the same for Firefox, then you are creating something everyone gets to enjoy and benefit from.

Finding Beta Bugs Is Not Our Problem

Microsoft is a corporation and they certainly don’t need your charity to develop a web browser. Finding IE7′s bugs is not a community problem. It’s a business problem and it’s one that belongs to Microsoft.

Why Internet Explorer Sucks

Internet Explorer 6 sucks and there’s a clear reason why. They simply stopped working on it. After IE6 came out, Microsoft disbanded the product team. Let me repeat that. Having released Internet Explorer 6, they shut down the team and distributed it’s programmers to other parts of the company.

What Were They Thinking?

Did they think they had finally, once and for all won this whole ‘Internet thing’ and didn’t need to work on a browser anymore? Were they aware that the center-point of that whole anti-trust lawsuit that they lost was about their integration of Internet Explorer into Windows. After spending all that money defending their choice to develop Internet Explorer as a part of Windows (and losing), why in the world did they then just abandon the software and let it rot? What sort of bonehead made that choice?

Regardless, once they realized that Firefox was gaining steam, they brought together a new IE team including some past team members and got working on it again. That brings us to today and the release of Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2.

Let’s review the results of their restarted labor.

Internet Explorer 7 is Still a UI Nightmare

Microsoft claims IE7 has a “streamlined” interface. Lets compare the three major browsers out there with their default toolbars. Keep in mind that all three of these browsers are designed to fulfill the same need of browsing the internet.

Screenshots are linked so you can do your own comparisons.

Safari 2: 7 buttons on 2 rows (including bookmarks bar)
Firefox 1.5: 11 buttons on 2 rows (no buttons on bookmarks bar)
IE7 Beta 2: 23 buttons on 2 rows

IE7 was clearly designed by studying Firefox and Safari. Couldn’t they study the UI too and somehow not add more than double the amount of choices it takes to do the job?

Actually, now that I think of it, let’s compare IE6 and IE7 to see which is more “streamlined”.
IE6: 17 buttons on 2 rows
IE7 Beta 2: 23 buttons on 2 rows

Yes, IE7 has more features than IE6, but both Safari and Firefox have learned how to add features without adding UI complication.

I wonder how many more buttons there will be once you add the ‘recommended MSN toolbar’. I guess in the case of IE7 “streamlined” means “pretty colors”.

Feature Additions

• Tabbed browsing (which Opera had in 2000 and Mozilla in 2001)
• Tab Expose (inspired by Foxspose which is itself inspired by Apple’s Expose from 2003)
• RSS Support (Supported by Firefox, Safari and an insane number of dedicated feed readers)
• Improved web standards support (The truth is they’ve spent most of their time fixes all the things that were seriously screwed up with IE6′s standards support rather than actually expanding support outward and managing to do things like pass the Acid 2 browser test.)
• Security Improvements (I’m not even going to knock this one apart. Internet Explorer’s track record on security is abysmal and security alerts and patches in the days ahead will be criticism enough.)

Strange Deficits

Pictures in PNG format are described by Wired as “slightly desaturated and washed out” and “crunchy”. (The PNG format was approved in 1996 and recommended by the W3C in 2003.)

Will Internet Explorer Ever Catch Up?

Good software takes time and while the other browser folks were hard at work, Microsoft took a nap. So, can Microsoft meet or beat the competition on features in future releases of Internet Explorer? They certainly aren’t going to do it with IE7, but does it even matter since it’ll always be the default browser in Windows? The truth is, I can’t really see a situation where Microsoft catches up in features and standards support as development of Firefox and Safari are certainly not going to give up their lead as superior pieces of software.

The Verdict

Even once IE7 makes it’s way to a final release, it will still be a substandard browser when compared to the competition.

If you know of anyone still suffering with IE6, please help them download Firefox so they can browse happy.

Safari:

• has inline spellchecking from an OS-wide dictionary.
• runs much faster, especially when loading up multiple tabs.
• has much better integration with Newsfire, my RSS reader.
• shares common shortcut keys that I’m used to with most mac applications.
• easily implements auto-linking for bookmark groups.
• creates tidier archives when I choose to save a page locally.

Firefox irritated me:

• every time it ran into a new downloadable format and I would have to specify the application that should open it. A pre-built set of assumptions that I can alter later would have been more helpful.
• when it downloaded something and had ignored the default action I previously had told it to remember for that file type.
• whenever I had to deal with it’s sometimes awkward bookmark manager.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox and if I were on the Windows platform there’s no question it would be my browser of choice, but on the Mac, Safari delivers the better experience and equal if not better support for standards.

Firefox, of course, is not leaving my machine though. I need it for cross-browser testing as well as for the fantastic Web Developer plugin for Firefox. It’s a constant lifesaver.

• a new customizable UI for writing your posts
• a fantastic new post preview
• easy file uploading
• new import section for migrating content from other blogs

My only criticism at this point is that the admin tool seems to have gotten unnecessarily chunky.

I’ve successfully upgraded two installs, but a third didn’t go so well for reasons not entirely known at this point, so before you upgrade, make sure you backup both your files and your database.

Download WordPress 2.0

Firefox 1.5 is ready to go, so make sure you head over and download it. In addition, it’s a good time to pimp it out to your friends and help them get away from the aging browser they’ve simply gotten used to. (Although it’s best to leave Safari users alone as they still have the only browser that passes the Acid2 test, putting these two browsers neck-in-neck as far as I’m concerned.)

There’s a lot of new stuff in Firefox 1.5, but the things that you will most likely notice are:

• You can reorder your tabs by dragging them around
• Much faster browsing
• Lots of usability enhancements
• Pop-up blocking is better

Stuff that geeks care about

• Better CSS2 and CSS3 support
• Improved DOM support
• Javascript 1.6 implementation
• SVG support!!!!!

Here’s the comprehensive list of fixes and improvements in Firefox 1.5.

I’m most excited about playing with the SVG support. To see what I mean, load up Firefox 1.5 and then play with this SVG lines example and these transparent triangles. There’s a full gallery of examples over at croczilla from simple lines to full illustrations.

This is great news. It would seem Microsoft is working with the Web Standards Project which we can only hope means a healthy commitment to standards support in Internet Explorer 7 and beyond. Good to hear. If you don’t understand why this is such a good thing, pick up a copy of Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards for a primer.

So, Microsoft announced operating system-wide support for RSS in longhorn last week, but what grabbed more attention was that Microsoft also announced their own extension to RSS.

First off, Microsoft is arriving late to this party, and not in the fashionable manner. Sure, they’re releasing it under a kinder license than usual, but the whole thing smacks of “See? We like blogging and Creative Commons and RSS! We’re cool kids too!”

So, how should we all react to this news?

1. If you’re a developer, ignore all of this. Every little bit of it. Don’t implement this addition in your code. It would be silly of you to do so. There are better advancements going on elsewhere that will see the light of day much much sooner. By the time Microsoft gets it’s implementation out the door, we’ll have already evolved to the next thing.
2. If you’re a future user of longhorn, then it’ll probably be beneficial to have RSS support native to the OS (although you have another eighteen months to wait to enjoy something the rest of us have been enjoying for quite some time.)
3. If you make an RSS reader for Windows, get ready to be pushed off the map when longhorn arrives.

If Microsoft wants to show it’s support and love of RSS, it should start by adding RSS feeds to it’s websites.

Google has removed Web Accelerator citing that they have reached capacity. I can’t help but wonder if all the negative feedback was the real reason. Here’s hoping it’s gone for good.

Previously:
To All: Don’t Use Google Accelerator, To Google: Don’t Be Evil

For your safety and the health of the web, don’t install Google Accelerator. If you already have installed it, please uninstall Google Accelerator. Google Accelerator makes the huge mistake of treating the web as if it were all content without regard for applications, which is incredibly strange for a company that works largely on web applications.

Google Accelerator is a pretty stupid beta release from a normally smart company. Although it’s intention is to speed up web surfing, it has thus far violated the privacy of numerous users, deleted and rearranged people’s information in web-based applications and has the potential for much more heartache.

Google seems to intent on making an entire copy of the web on it’s own servers in the name of speeding everything up. Unfortunately, this means that you, as a developer, lose control over what exactly gets served up to an individual user leading to an array of problems and that you, as a user, end up with some fast but potentially confusing and data-losing experiences. Hey Google, the web is plenty fast. Let individual developers worry about whether their servers are up to the task. Let the web be the web and you just build applications on top of it like the rest of us, okay? If you use your enormous clout and user base to change the rules of what should be an open platform of independent publishers and developers, you’re clearly violating your ‘Don’t be evil’ policy.

Pull Google Accelerator off the web and save us all a lot of grief.

Update:
Google Removes Down Web Accelerator