So I was reading my feeds, and stumbled upon this:
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/show.dml/295296
Investigating further, the Opera Watch piece:
(
http://operawatch.com/news/2006/06/m...feed-icon.html)
Quote:
The Mozilla Foundation asked Opera to sign an agreement on the use of its RSS feed icon in the Opera browser.
Earlier this year, Opera adopted the orange RSS feed icon (pictured on the right) from Mozilla Firefox for use in the Opera browser. This after Microsoft announced that it too would include the icon in the next release of Internet Explorer (IE). There has been an ongoing effort between browser vendors to encourage more consistency between the various browsers.
For now Opera removed the icon in its latest weekly build of the Opera 9 desktop browser, which was released today.
“We fully respect their rights to the icon and will not use it as long as this isn’t sorted out”, said Johan Borg, Opera UI developer and Desktop team manager at Opera Software.
It’s not clear whether Opera and Mozilla will work this issue out in time for the release of Opera 9 later this month (Read: Opera 9 Review).
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Now, the way it is phrased, it seems kind of ridiculous. And indeed, some of the comments accuse Mozilla of corporate sell-out, etc - the usual Opera troll banter. Regardless though, a little sketchy.
Now, the excellent Mitchell Baker blogged about this a couple of days ago, and went underneath my radar until now:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitch...an_part_2.html
It would seem as though the Mozilla Foundation is pursuing what is described as "Option 3" - which sounds incredibly reasonable from Mitchell's perspective.
So... discuss.
It seems a little silly of Opera to shy from an honest (and good) intention,
especially if Microsoft submits to the icon pledge (we don't know if they are still integrating the icon after this move), and is an invitation to the Opera trolls by not explaining why they aren't or linking to an explanation of what's going on. If you read the opera:about page, it seems they have no problem including code from non-Opera sources, so what difference does an image make? Of course, I sympathize with not wanting unnecessary restrictions in my software, and I'm willing to concede that the average Opera user probably knows enough to not be confused by RSS/Atom/syndication in general. (But if Opera ever wants more than 0.3% market-share - or whatever it is - perhaps they should rethink this assumption.)
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