It all started in August, when Microsoft announced that it wanted to embrace RSS feeds. At the time, the company proposed changing the RSS logo and the name of the service within Internet Explorer (IE) 7.

Now Microsoft has announced, that its forth-coming IE 7 Web browser will adopt Firefox's RSS feed icon, effectively making the popular orange square with white radio waves the industry standard.

The Firefox icon is one of the company's most distinguishable features, appearing in the browser frame or address bar when an RSS feed is available on the page.

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, and is a system for generating automated feeds of Web site updates such as blog postings or news, and sending them to an e-mail address or an RSS reader.

According to inside sources, the Microsoft-Mozilla agreement is an informal one with no money having changed hands between the 2 companies. However the coming-together of these 2 camps is enough to cause a flutter in technological circles

Microsoft's IE 7 team actually visited the offices of Mozilla to work out the deal. The Microsoft team expressed the view that there was an agreement in principle, that it is in the user s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser.

IE 7, slated to release mid-2006, will be the first version to feature RSS feed searches and bookmarks; but unlike Firefox, users will not be able to read a list of each feed's headlines.