[3444] in Release_7.7_team
Web client icon
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sat Aug 31 16:38:48 2002
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 16:38:45 -0400
Message-Id: <200208312038.QAA04945@error-messages.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
I'm trying to decide what icon should live on the panel in the web
browser spot. Right now we have a Netscape icon with "Netscape"
written below it. In picking a new icon, there's a tension between
honesty, usability, and cross-platform consistency. Options I can see
are:
1. Sacrifice honesty: keep the current icon, but make it start
mozilla. We'd probably also make the "netscape" command start
mozilla, if we're going to do this.
2. Sacrifice consistency and usability: use the Mozilla icon, with
"Mozilla" written below it. The problem here is that everyone
has heard of Netscape, but lots of people haven't heard of
Mozilla, and won't realize that it's a web browser.
3. Compromise by providing less information and sacrificing a little
usability: use the Mozilla icon with "WWW" written below it.
People won't necessarily associate the Mozilla dragon head with
"web browser", but the "WWW" would probably do.
4. Compromise by providing less information and sacrificing a little
honesty: use the Netscape icon with "WWW" written below it.
5. Find or produce a generic icon for "world wide web," and write
WWW below it. I don't know how I would go about this. (The IE
icon is nicely generic, but everyone recognizes it as the IE
icon, so that's no good. Plus there are probably intellectual
property issues there.)
I like option 3 myself.
We can talk about this on Wednesday if we have trouble settling it
here. I will produce an icon for #3, but that doesn't mean we have to
go with it. (If we pick any option other than #1, I'm also going to
need to replace the other icons so that the text font is consistent;
as a bonus, it should be a little more readable as well. Or we could
go back to PSB and hope we can get them to use the same tools and
font to produce an icon.)
