The Microsoft RSS Team have decided on the new RSS/Atom feed icon that IE7 will use.

It'll look like this:

Does that seem familiar? It should do, since it's the exact same icon that Mozilla Firefox uses.

If you're wondering, Microsoft didn't steal it, members of the RSS team met with some of the Mozilla developers and they all decided that using the same icon in both browsers would make life much easier for their users as it will be consistent.

This is very good news, for geeks and normal users alike.

Read the full RSS Team blog entry.

Update: Apparently Outlook 12 is going to use the same icon, and I'm sure it'll be used by Microsoft anywhere else they need a feed icon in Vista. I'm hoping that Opera and Safari will change their feed icons to this one too, since they both use buttons with the letters RSS. Their buttons are also blue, instead of orange. Why they chose blue over orange is beyond me.

Also... I wish people would stop calling RSS an acronym. IT'S NOT AN ACRONYM! It's an abbreviation - specifically an initialism.

Initialism: An abbreviation consisting of the first letter or letters of words in a phrase (for example, IRS for Internal Revenue Service), syllables or components of a word (TNT for trinitrotoluene), or a combination of words and syllables (ESP for extrasensory perception) and pronounced by spelling out the letters one by one rather than as a solid word.

Acronym: A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

Basically... if an abbreviation is pronounced as a word, it's an acronym, if you spell out the letters, it's an initialism. Why is that so hard for people to grasp?