Webmaster Forum / Browsers / Internet Explorer / March 2006

I was just looking for a place to tell you a few things I don't like
about IE 7.

1. The RSS supports is confusing and, to me, useless. I am a developer
and long time ago I have developed a small ASP web site that allows me
to view my RSS feeds at a glance, instead of going through each end
every one and study them individually - just by looking at a small list
I can see whether there's anything new, and if so, I just click a small
+ icon and expand a short description of the new article. I think the
value of RSS is in the "at a glance" viewing. I don't know anyone who
reads RSS feeds for a living, so viewing RSS updates should be a
peripheral and quick operation, not something that requires me to click
3 times and manually check long half-empty XSL-formatted pages. As a
developer and a fairly intelligent person, I have to say that RSS
support in IE 7 as it is now is not intuitive nor useful.

2. Address bar should be below tabs line, not above.

3. "Home" button doesn't belong to the right. OK, you can change its
position, but that position is not preserved between sessions.

4. UI is too flickery and not very neat. I just bought a lightning-fast
top-of-the line desktop with 2 GB RAM and 256M video card, yet IE 7.0
often flickers and occasionally leaves things on the toolbar unpainted.
Hope this gets fixed in the release version.

5. It's about time the famous "IE cannot display the webpage" is made a
little more informative. Obscuring troubleshooting information isn't
helping anyone, beginner or not, especially when it contains BAD or
misleading advice. I'd even rather see "Can't retrieve page. Full
stop." than a list of useless, incorrect and inapplicable
"suggestions". Second best would be to actually provide useful
troubleshooting information, such as the stage when the problem
occurred (dns, HTTP error<>200, etc).