That orange web feed icon

Following Microsoft’s announcement last December that it will use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks icon in it’s upcoming Windows Internet Explorer 7 (currently in beta and already exhibiting the icon) to notify users about the availability of web feeds for the current web site, Opera has recently started to use the orange icon for their web feeds at opera.com.

Opera Watch’s Daniel Goldman confirmed with Opera that they are considering it’s use in Opera web browser as well.

Feedicons.com is a web site aiming to spread the use of the icon among web sites offering web feeds. It offers a package full of different versions of the icon in several colors, sizes, backgrounds and image formats like the one that illustrates this post. I would prefer to use colors for additional information such as announcing new content available since last visit or a web feed already subscribed to, and stick to the orange icon for basic notification.

So hopefully, in a very near future there will be a single way for users in any browser or platform to be notified on a web feed availability.

Edit: Seems like the evaluation didn’t take long. The Opera team announced that the icon wil be included in the next release of Opera browser. (Thanks Kelson for pointing it out.)