RSS icon
A dot with two arcs spreading from it, usually on an orange square, is the feed icon: it marks a link to a website’s RSS or Atom feed, which you can subscribe to for its updates.
Easily confused with
How to read it
Stephan Horlander drew the icon for Mozilla Firefox. In October 2005 Jane Kim of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team set out what Microsoft wanted in a feed icon for Internet Explorer 7: it should convey newness, activity and subscription, build on the orange rectangle most feed buttons already used, and avoid text, because an icon reading “FEED” may be cryptic to people whose language doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. In November Kim’s team met John Lilly and Chris Beard of Mozilla, and on 14 December 2005 she announced that Internet Explorer 7 would use the Firefox icon whenever a page had a feed; the Outlook 12 team said it would use it too. The RSS Advisory Board reported that the next version of Opera would also use it. Alex King noted in 2007 that the icon was owned by the Mozilla Foundation.
Also searched as: feed icon, rss feed icon, rss icon, rss symbol.
RSS, Atom or any feed
The icon names no format. Microsoft said Internet Explorer 7 supported Atom and every version of RSS, and that it used “RSS” for syndication in general. A 2006 RSS Advisory Board proposal by Rogers Cadenhead asked the board to support the common icon and encourage publishers to use it on any feed, whether Atom or either of the formats called RSS.
Look-alikes
The Wi-Fi symbol is also a dot with arcs. In Be Connected’s icon guide its arcs spread upward from a dot at the bottom centre, while the feed icon’s arcs spread diagonally from a dot in the lower corner.
Read next
- Next in Interface iconsHamburger menu (☰)Three stacked lines are the hamburger menu: a button that opens a menu, usually a website’s or app’s main navigation.
- The same shape in Accessibility symbolsTTY symbolA telephone handset above a keyboard is the International Symbol of TTY. It marks a text telephone, a TTY, which lets people who are deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired type a phone conversation.
More interface icons
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with curves and waves or squares and rectangles.
Sources
- The orange icon..., Jane Kim, 7 October 2005, Microsoft RSS Team Blog (Microsoft Learn archive)
- Icons: It’s still orange, Jane Kim, 14 December 2005, Microsoft RSS Team Blog (Microsoft Learn archive)
- Proposal: Support Common Feed Icon, Rogers Cadenhead, 4 March 2006, RSS Advisory Board
- Mozilla, Microsoft Promote New Syndication Icon, Rogers Cadenhead, Workbench (cadenhead.org)
- Share Icon Guidelines, Alex King, 9 October 2007, alexking.org, Author’s reply in comments
- Which icon is that? (Be Connected visual glossary of icons), Be Connected guide to common technology icons, poster version 9, eSafety Commissioner, Australian Government, Poster labels (Wi-Fi icon noted in NOTES.md)
- Material Icons codepoints (MaterialIcons-Regular.codepoints), Google Material Design icons, font/MaterialIcons-Regular.codepoints, Google (material-design-icons repository on GitHub), rss_feed
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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