I am Jeremy Epling, a Program Manager on the IE User Experience team. One of my foci for IE7 has been improving the Favorites and History experience. I want to tell you about the new features we added and the motivation that was behind them.
The IE6 experience for managing your Favorites and History is fairly disjoint and inconsistent. In IE7 we wanted to address these issues as well as make sure that we had a great experience between Tabs and Favorites.
Favorites and History issues in IE6
- Favorites and History entry points are scattered across the IE6 frame
- Cascading menus are difficult to navigate
- History can only be access via persistent Explorer Bar
One place for navigating to your Favorites, Feeds, and History
You can now add, manage, and navigate to your Favorites, Feeds, and History from one location as opposed to the 3 separate locations in IE6. We also allow you flexibility in how you want to navigate to your “Web memory” (i.e. Favorites, Feeds, and History). You can now access all of these “Web memory” locations by using an autohiding menu or as a docked sidebar.
We have also unified adding to your “Web memory”. You can now go the plus button, next to the Favorites Center star, to add a Favorite/Tab Group to Favorites or Subscribe to a web feed. You don’t need to distinguish between the types of content you are viewing on the Web. All you need to do is click the Plus button when you want to store what are viewing for later recall.
Just click the Favorites Center star to open the Favorites Center in menu mode and then select your view: Favorites, Feeds, or History. If you want dock the Favorites Center, all you need to do is press the dock button to the right of the History button.
No more disappearing menus when looking for a Favorite
The Favorites Center’s collapsible tree list is a usability improvement because it does not have the problem of disappearing when the user is navigating hierarchies of folders. It was easy for the IE6 Favorites menu to disappear because you moved the cusor 1 pixel out side of the menu. Many users found this annoying, which is why we have moved to the tree. The tree also makes navigating deep hierarchies more space efficient because you don’t have menus popping out and taking up a lot of horizontal space.
Open in Tabs made easy
One of my favorite features in IE7 is the Open in Tabs hover button. I like it because it helps to make Tabs available to the basic users that will never learn CTRL + click. This feature, along with having Tabs on by default, and the New Tab button will help everyone take advantage of tabs. (We will offer the Open in Tab hover button for individual Favorites in Beta 2-- in the IE7 Beta Preview build, the hover button offers the Delete action). For our final release IE7 will also have a warning dialog for folders that contain more that 30 Favorites to help prevent accidentally opening 50 Favorites in Tab.
Streamlined Add to Favorites dialog
Besides making it easier to add to your “web memory”, we have given the Add to Favorites dialog a facelift. Besides just looking better, the combobox for choosing a folder now allows you to see more folders at once and not have to expand the hierarchy to find the target folder.
- Jeremy Epling, Internet Explorer Program Manager
Seriously, just how many program managers are there on the IE team? Is it more than developers?
I lost my feeds on upgrading from IE7 Beta1 to Ie7 Beta2 preview. I had subscribed to some feeds after installing IE7 Beta1. Then uninstalled IE7 and installed IE7 Beta2 and.. the feeds are gone. Is this is a known issue ?
–AA
There need to be a few more changes to the favourites centre. The icon on the taskbar needs to be the old star icon from XP (at least on the XP version of IE7). Also the favourites centre shouldnt close every time you click on a link. I middle click my links to open 3 or 4 at anyone time, it doubles my clicks because of the fact it closes.
Also we need a sync feeds button that will synchronize all the feeds in the centre. The automatic function is not always enough.
AC, there are more developers than PMs.
AC,
I’m not sure what the ratio is off-hand but most feature teams consist of a small group of developers, a small group of testers (probably at least a one to one ratio with developers) and a PM or two depending on the scope of the features. A product, like IE, is composed of a great many feature teams working together with a set of leads and a general leadership team keeping the overall project moving.
We get a lot of program managers posting on the blog because, for the most part, they created the design of the feature and wrote its specifications. They are in a good position to communicate about that feature to the public.
We have a number of developers and an occasional tester (like Scott Stearns, the Director of Test for IE) who post here but it is a lot less often.
– Al Billings [MSFT]
Is there a keyboard shortcut to open the Favorites Center? I know Alt+A still works to get to the old menu, but that can’t show me my feeds.
Also, I agree that there should be a way to manually refresh (download) all your feeds, as well as all feeds within a folder.
Just an average consumer who found out about the beta through Heather’s blog.
So far so good. I like the Favorites center much better. Only issue so far is the number of RSS feeds that tell me there is some issue with subscribing. Those that do work are great.
Jamie,
Click the favorites center icon, then click the square with the green arrow. Your favorites list now won’t close after each click.
Also, the Favorite’s center is not favorites of ie6 thus should not be the same icon. Rather it is favorites, feeds, and history. the sub icons look about the same but smaller to those of ie6.
It would be great to have a way to convert/sync favorites to a web page for those of us who use multiple computers at different locations. I know there are services that do things like this, but a simple "publish/sync" ability for favorites would be great.
this is all very nice, but the first thing i checked before installing the developer beta2 preview is whether or not i would be able to cleanly run it alongside my existing ie6. to my dismay, but not surprise, this is not easily done, and if you are successful in getting this setup properly, it is not supported. not supported? are you crazy?
give us a beta version to test our sites and applications to prepare for the future, but disrupt our ability to conduct our every day work on ie6?
what’s wrong with you people? don’t you understand that as developers none of us can afford to screw up our ie6 installations? and most of us can’t afford to spend hours or days untangling the mess that an unsupported configuration could cause. do you really expect all of us to set aside a special ie7 test machine? get real.
why is it that i can run every other browser side by side and multiple versions of them, but somewhere deep in the design of ie software it wants to wind its tentacles around other critical functions of my system? i recently installed an ALPHA version of the flock browser without fear or hesitation because i know how open source developers think. lightweight, encapsulated. clean design inside and out. it installed cleanly and without harm to my system, and is at least as standards compliant as the more mature firefox (according to the acid2 test).
judging from all i’ve read, and the fact that many of the features ie7 implements have been around for literally years in other browsers – and the fact that for all its talk about standards, ie7 is still way off – i’m already thinking about ie8 or 9, or ieNever. i’ll continue to promote alternative, standards-focused browsers and hope that the mess m$ has made will someday just go away when it comes to internet browsing.
no offense to any of you hard working microsoft developers, but it seems to me that all you folks in redmond are still drinking too much of your own kool aid.
advice: join the rest of the world. provide real support for developers. stop ramming stuff down our throats with such blind arrogance.
Looks good. At least things are more localized and can be found easily and effectively.
How about an option to refresh the favicon.ico for a website? You download it when a site is added, but only give us the option to change the icon to a local DLL/EXE resource. Even better, let us be able to scan/process the favorites list for broken links and auto update the icons fron their sites.
Also, if a right click menu falls beyond the bounds of the Favorites Center window, it does not process any mouse clicks which are on the menu but outside the Favorites Center window.
Ya, this was exactly one of the features I was looking for to really make Tabs shine. Took me a while to find it (and I whined the forums at lot before it was there, and bit afterwards too!)
We need, however, a similar tool for the quick-link toolbar. I see that you have folders in your quicklink toolbar. Wouldn’t it be nice if you clicked on the folder itself in the quicklink bar that all the subitems opened in new tabs? I think so, and obviously some though so enough to make the homepage button work that way. I am suggesting that ALL quicklink buttons htat represent folders work the same way. A main button body to launch all nested items and a drop down to access sub-items directly.
Oh, and you might wanna think about replacing the menus launched when you click on a quicklink with a popup similar to the favorites, after all, it also suffers from the same "menu" problem.
Incidently, when it comes to launching multiple sub items, let us pick our own ‘warning’ threshold. Some people would never want to launch more than 3, some people might not mind 30 (I was thinking more like 10, but that proves my point that no fixed number would be suitable.. Let us define a warning threshold!)
Keep up the good work!
When I’m simply browsing through feeds I want the process to be as quick and unobtrusive as possible, otherwise I’ll just go to the actual website. The current way feeds are displayed in IE7 is very impractical as far as speed and efficiency is concerned.
See this screenshot for example:
http://www.rowanw.com/screens/ie_feeds_annoying.png
That yellow message shows up everytime I visit a feed, even when I’m viewing a feed I’m already subscribed to. It takes up so much space and doesn’t offer any help whatsoever if I already know what a feed is.
The small silver box next to it doesn’t help much either, look at the size of the thing, then look how many options are in it. There are three (3) things you can do with that feed – Show them, sort them or search.
I think a much better implementation would be to put a bar at the top of the page with the same options, the same way blogger.com does it. This would save valuable space and allow us to peruse feeds much more efficiently.
Also, I found a bug concerning the icons on the right side of the tabs, when you remove the icons and re-open IE they come back. And when you do remove them the tab toolbar becomes very "broken" until you re-adjust the window.
I wouldn’t have posted this if I didn’t expect these problems to be rectified. If you don’t change the layout of the feed boxes, at least let us manually remove them.
The Favorites Center is looking nice. Please also remember to get IE7 up to the Firefox / Opera level of standards support so we can have a more usable web.
We need these basic CSS 2.1 features added:
display: table
display: table-cell
display: table-row
display: table-*
min-width
max-width
min-height
max-height
:before
:after
The new favorites center is certainly an improvement over IE 6 (where the implementation was one of the kludges that drove me to Firefox). Any plans to integrate the favorites with Microsoft’s live.com so that Favorites/Bookmarks are available from any computer, instead of having to maintain a set of Favorites at home, one at work…
Are there plans for integration with Windows Live Favorites? I’d love for an easier way to add them.
This is not tested properly for day to day browsing. Most of the sites doesn’t come frist time then you need to refresh. In the test editor typing is very slow… it flickers a lot whenever it runs. Open a new tab see it flickering again. I can’t believe this product is from Microsoft…:( I don’t have my IE6 after installing it.. And I don’t know how to get it back.. I want to get rid of this creap IE7 beta.
I may have done something wrong, but when I tried to add a site to my favorites (my list is quite long and deep) it was really a pain to navigate to the proper folder, I had to scroll down past maybe a couple of hundred folders and subfolders to get to where I wanted to put the new favorite. It was very difficult to remember where I was in the folder hierarchy (sp?) because I couldn’t tell how "deep" I was at the time. It was much easier to add favorites the old way.
I would like to see the team make it possible for one to click and drag the icon in the address bar directly to the favorites folder. It would save one or two steps in adding a favorite.
I too would like integration with favorites.live.com
I wrote you about favicon 3 days ago and surprise, I was sure to read my answer here today since the topic is the Favorites Center.
Unfortunatly, no word on that. Will IE7 handle correctly favicons and keep them? I need to know because you realize this would mean that IE7 is the 1st version to finally support them correctly? Hard to beleive it took that long to fix.
I’m now a FavOrg (PC Magazine utility) user because of that and I also like the fact I can run it to refresh all favicon but also to find out if all Favorites are still alive. Will such a feature be implemented also?
Thanks.
I forgot to add that if I’m asking again it’s because the 1st picture up there don’t even show any favicon. If supported, I really think you should consider insert a new image with some favicons showing. MSDN IE got one for sure.
I think it is illogical to lump favorites, feeds, and history under "favorites center" and by pushing them down one level all you’ve really done is make it so we have to do more clicking to get to where we want to go. Either separate them or at least provide separate buttons that can be added to the toolbar.
One of the reasons I don’t use IE is because my file explorer favourites are the *same* as the ones in IE. I like to separate these into there respective groups. I have favourites for the Web (Firefox Bookmarks) and favourites for my computer (file explorer). Until the two are separated I don’t think I’ll be coming back…
Regards
Lee
Mark, by our final release you will be able to get updated FavIcons just by revisiting a site that you added as a Favorite in IE6. Right now, you only get the FavIcon when you add a new Favorite via IE7.
Rhialto, we will fully support FavIcons by the final release of IE7 and you will not lose them as you did in IE6. As you can tell in the Beta2 Preview, we still have some bugs to work out.
Please could it be called the Favourite Centre for the UK version? It wasn’t really a very choice of name for consistent worldwide spelling…
Nice feature though. The RSS feeds don’t seem to update very often, but other than that I like it.
The ability to delete favs without the confirmation would be nice especially if it just moves them to recycle bin.
Also, would it add value to provide the menu from the + icon when right clicking over fav’s icon?
Mabster,
Ctrl+i will open the Favorites Center to your favorites, ctrl+h to your browsing history and ctrl+j to your feeds.
Kelly
I’d like to have a homepage that shows my feeds, rather than having to open IE with the feeds list taking up space on the left of every page.
In other words – I’d like a dedicated "webpage" for viewing my feeds that I can go to whenever I want, rather than hiding/unhiding the menu on the left.
When viewing a list of items in a feed, opening n a new tab takes me to that tab, which is a pain. I want the new tabs to open in the background so i can easily continue to browse for new items to view. Once I’ve identified tham all, I’ll then go to the tabs.
Thanks
It’s all great though – I’m loving it.
…From the IE discussion group…
The favorites center is a nice idea but it could be improved. The technology
needed for some of these changes is already implemented in other MS products
so it shouldn’t be that difficult.
-There should be a search bar at the top of each of the panels that
automatically filters depending on keywords or ratings like in Live messenger
or Media Player
-It would be good to have the different sections of the centre in dockable
panes like you get in graphics programmes so you are able to see all of them
at once
-Live favourites should be here aswell, with easy synchronize buttons
between the PCs and Live favorites
-"Organize favorites" was always bad but i don’t think it has improved at all
in the new version. It is so much easier to edit and organize favourites in
explorer why not just open that folder, this would also help people
understand where they are actually stored for each user
– For home computers it would be good to have a "share favourites" option,
like how the start menu shortcuts can be put in the all users folder or the
users personal folder. Maybe you could colour-code shared and personal faves
(this would also be good for the start menu but that’s not really the focus)
– An interface like the media player library interface would make it very
easy to sort, edit names, add keywords, assign ratings
– I used the messenger toolbar in IE6 to have a group of tabs with my own
website in one tab, its FTP site with folder view in another tab, and useful
websites in other tabs, but FTP doesn’t seem to be integrated anymore 🙁
– Last but not least, people in the UK spell favourites with a U in the
middle! It would make a lot of people smile to see this conflict change (i.e.
the whole UK population) to reflect the PCs user locale settings. France have
favoris so why can’t we have it our way?
You describe the Favourites center as an autohiding menu. I got a bit excited thinking it meant the same as Auto-Hide on the taskbar. I think the latter would be a better way of doing it. I have a long list of favourites which i access quite alot. However, i don’t want it to take up too much space. A docked, auto-hiding menu would be a fantastic solution.
Ditto to what Ian said….we’re not all American you know.
It’s great, but it needs to include Windows Live Faves for sure – it’s so great and its a pain to maintain two lots of faves.
It would be nice, if the Favorites menu:
http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/3931/capture020720061218316co.jpg
would not disapear in fullscreen mod:
http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/8257/capture020720061218410pq.jpg
I agree with Thom.
"A docked, auto-hiding menu would be a fantastic solution"
@TheTOM.SK
Your images are the same!
Is anyone else getting nothing when they click "organise favourites" I tried opening it in ie7b2 and it just doesn’t do anything…..What am i doing wrong? (That and the fact that no cookies get saved in ie7b2!!)
It would be nice if we could configure the shortucts used by IE, eg. ctrl+j opens rss feeds – in my machine, I would reconfigure or disable this shortcut.
The reason for this is that some applications that run on browsers use shortcuts; and since rss feeds didn’t exist, this is one such shortcut that is used in PeopleSoft. It’s kindda annoying to use the shortcut then close the favorites center that shows up at the same time.
(note for those who might feel the need to warn me not to use beta software with work apps: this is a test machine, development is done in my other machine)
anyway… nice work there! IE7 rules. 🙂
"(That and the fact that no cookies get saved in ie7b2!!)"
That part is made of Wrong. I get cookies all the time.
"Please could it be called the Favourite Centre for the UK version? It wasn’t really a very choice of name for consistent worldwide spelling…"
Well, it WAS a Preview of a Beta of IE.
Now if it was like that in version 6, well that’s just wrong.
1) Wheres the ‘sort by name’ option? It’s no longer in the context menu.
2) Beating a horse to death: refresh feeds button.
3) Docking for fullscreen mode
4) Refreshing / changing icons
5) favorites.live.com integeration
6) multiple columns OPTION
AFAIK, IE uniquely identifies a bookmark using page’s title. I think it’s pretty annoying because this behavior can overwrite existing bookmarks if there’re any new pages I bookmark with the same title. I want to know why you choose this behavior.
As a comparison, maybe you guys can see at Firefox on how this behavior was implemented.
It should be called "Favourites Centre" Not "Favorites Center" 🙂 Maybe oneday people that live in Britain/England and the rest of the English speaking world (that use English UK) will actually be able to set their language to "English (UK)" and actually GET English UK! There is a difference you know.
How about we just call it "Bookmarks".. start a standard name accross all browsers?
Thanks.
I have a very different perspective on the favorites center. To me, favorites are just files organized into folders. That suggests the same GUI as Windows Explorer — a TWO PANE view, the left being the favorites folders, and to its right the favorites themselves. To the right of that is the main "file contents" window, i.e., the usual browser window.
To open and close favorites folders, we use EXACTLY the same + and – signs, and have access to the same right-mouse actions as in Windows Explorer — copy, move, create shortcut. In Vista, the user should also be able to create Virtual favorites folders, just as they will be able to do that in Windows Explorer.
The same approach should apply to feeds and history.
In case anyone thinks this is a new paradigm, it isn’t. Outlook 2003 moved to exactly this 3-pane view of the world (folders of item, items, and item contents), and people really liked it. It unifies the way the browser works with the way that Windows Explorer works, and vastly simplifies everything.
Further to my comments on a Windows Explorer GUI for the Favorites Center….
If, like Windows Explorer, the Favorites Center had the same column header capabilities, then people’s requests for sorting, etc., would also be vastly simplified.
I agree that favorites should be called "favourites".
Certainly don’t use "bookmarks" as favourites is an internationally recognisable word and bookmarks isn’t.
@ Jeremy
One thing that I would really like to see is the autohide pane NOT hide when I middle click on something, instead, please have the pane hide when my mouse leaves the Favorites Center region.
Chances are, if I middle click one item, I will middle click another, and maybe another 🙂
Thanks!
I forgot to mention, why is it that I can not right-click and "sort by name" from the Favorites Center, only from the Classic menu?
Could there be an option in Internet Options that keeps the Favorites and Feeds in alpha order at all times?
Thanks
Let’s re-write Windows!
Color – colour
Favorites – favourites
Windows Security Center – … centre
etc..
Wait, this is getting absurd, you’ll make a mongrel out of Windows
ahh so thats how that little bugger works now
>>Now if it was like that in version 6,
>>well that’s just wrong.
Yes, we in the UK have had to put up with ‘favorites’ through every version of IE! It’s always bothered me – that along with ‘center’, ‘dialing’, ‘color’, etc. How hard would it be for MS to just change a few words to make them the correct spellings for the UK? I wasn’t expecting it to happen for the beta, but I could love to see a Favourites Centre for the UK version 🙂
Ian
@jace
Windows supports multi language versions. Why spell words in american (can’t really call it english anymore, can we ?) when that is not the chosen language ?
Could we have a seperate thread for localization in IE?
That thread could then be overrun with localization requests for every other microsoft product under the sun?
Or can we just limit the posts to the feature being discussed?
@hAl
In Control Panel, Under Regional and Language Settings, I have selected "English(United States)"
That ought to mean something, I don’t care to have Microsoft changing what it means mid-stream.
If you select another Regional setting, BY ALL MEANS, have things displayed according to your Regions standards :-D, but please don’t tread on US 😉
I saw and appreciated your gag in the first line of that blog – the plural of "focus" as "foci"… very amusing 🙂
With this sudden strict adherence to *PROPER* English, does this mean that in its final release, IE7 will have a true English (UK) version and get rid of the disgusting spelling of words such as "favourites" and "colour"?
😉 😉
Please let us synchronize favorites between machines. I have old ‘favorites’files scattered across my various machines at home & work. I can never seem to find what I’m looking for, because I happened to be on another machine when I found something worth keeping. The problem is intensified if you reinstall your OS, migrate to new hardware, etc…
Jace, the fact that sort by name is not in the context menu is a bug. It will be fixed by our final release.
In regards to keeping the menu up if links are clicked on, you can always dock the Favorites Center by pressing the button to the right of the History button.
Good point Jace – "center" makes me want to cry! Centre! 😀
Favorites or Favourites? I live in Canada and I’ve always read Favorites, same fore Center and not Centre. Sure we cannot get closer to USA than that so maybe that’s why it’s the english we learned.
This is about the same problem as french in France and in Canada. Sometimes we don’t use the same words, I would say people from France use more english terms than us french, hey they do "shopping" while we do "magasinage", now guess which word is in french!
But like everyone else, I don’t know why the spelling cannot be adapted to each country. There is a regional setting in the Control Panel and it must be used to configure any software.
Now does anyone know what it will be in french, ma native language? Used to be Favoris but I cannot image it called Le Centre des Favoris :-/
Speaking of favourites, this is my favourite bug in IE 5.5 and 6.0.
Has it been fixed in 7.0?
http://www.bazon.net/mishoo/articles.epl?art_id=958
In short, IE makes multiple redundant requests to the web server for the same image resource(s) when .innerHTML (and similar dynamic calls) is/are made. (to the tune of ***Gigs*** of wasted bandwidth)
I could care less about the fact that this sways stats etc. I just don’t want rediculous bandwidth hits due to a 7 year old bug, that *SHOULD* be fixed by now.
Rog.
Jeremy, glad to hear that Sort by Name will make it back in the final release…
How about the middle click idea? I really don’t want to dock the Favorites center…
AA –
We do not have a feed migration experience from Beta 1 to Beta 2 Preview. Sorry about that!
– Jane Kim [MSFT]
Ian –
You can have your feeds updated more frequently by going into the property page (right-click on a feed and select the properties menu item).
– Jane Kim [MSFT]
I would think that MS would release a little more stable beta to show off. I installed this beta and now wish i didnt. one annoying item is the blank page that comes up everytime you open another tab (and YES i did set my preferences to have that not happen) Man guys go look at Firefox and get a clue… THEN release a beta
I just have one request. With the Links toolbar, any folder located within the "Links" toolbar is treated like how it’s treated within the favorites center. As it stands, the folders within the "Links" toolbar folder are treated like normal explorer windows. You cannot middle click and have the links within that folder open up in tabs. I’d greatly like this to be implemented if it’s at all possible. Thank you!
Will,
This isn’t a Beta. Beta 2 isn’t out yet. This is a Beta 2 Preview. It is an interim build before Beta 2.
We had many many customers here on the blog and other places asking us to give everyone a build since the Beta 1 build was restricted. We heard this request and decided to make a build available to all of you.
This is not the Beta 2 build though. That won’t be out for a while.
– Al Billing [MSFT]
Will Shatter – It’s not a beta. It’s a beta preview. I would expect the official beta to be much more stable than this preview.
The "favorites" vs. "favourites" issue has come up several times before. As far as I can discern, Microsoft’s opinion is that it is better to spend effort on localizing for completely new languages (for which there is currently zero support) than for sublanguages. Michael Kaplan wrote a blog entry about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/02/01/521864.aspx.
My feeds do not auto-refresh.
It worked for a day and now it shows feeds when I manually rt click –> refresh-ed them.
Is there a way to force refresh feeds on startup?
I like the ideia of a search box on the favorites center, by the way a new "search in page" feature would be cool, this one is useless. And also you could make a new dialog for the browser options, this one beside the fact it is confusing, it is also very old.
IE7 is great, just keep listen to the feedback on the blog, there are great ideias here:)
Just curious, it must be about near 1 year we hear IE7 is in the works and we seems far from the final product. Are you working from scratch? I thought IE6 was the start point and from there working out the bugs and adding new stuff.
And I also thought that if Microsoft decided to get a team for an IE7, it would take no time to get it done which obviously is not the case here.
All this is curiosity and I’m not complaining.
Comment #s do not increase on F5 and/or rt click–>refresh
Hi
IE7 looking good
Here’s my idea for the _Favourites_ _Centre_ Team…
It would be great (to optionally enable) the ability to show feed item headings on an auto-hide pane, and be able to click on them (in much the same way that Google Desktop works).
Rhialto – It’s not from "scratch", it’s certainly built from where IE6 left off. But there’s been lots of significant changes made to the browser UI (mainly to support tabbed browsing). From a browser UI point of view, it’s the biggest change IE has ever seen. From an MSHTML point of view, it’s relatively minor.
Along with the Microsoft Live Beta, I would like to see a "Favorites" setting in the Tools->Options menu where you can configure where IE7 will get its Favorites. For instance, if your favorites are stored locally on your PC, you might select something like "Local Favorites". If you have Favorites on Microsoft Live, then you could select "Microsoft Live". The favorites would appear the same, just the source would be different. It could make managing your favorites on Microsoft Live easier.
In the favorites menu you should add "Import/Export".
I turned off "classic menus" trying to adjust to the new gui and reduced headers area only to find after a long search that the "import/export is only reachable from the classic "File…" menu.
also, you should add a choice to import/export all settings (feeds, bookmarks, history, etc.)
I’ve never liked using IE itself to save my bookmarks because I’ve never wanted to lose them and IE didn’t have an easy way to "save the full state" so if my laptop or PC drive crashes I don’t lose years and years of saved bookmarks.
with a one-click "save state" to a file on the desktop that I can easily backup, I would find the built-in bookmarks/feeds/history to be much more desirable to use.
When openning more than 30 tabs at once, you will show a confirmation dialog?
Openning many windows is not even a dangerous option (assuming IE properly threads the creation of tabs and loading of pages).
Am I the only one that HATES confirmation dialogs?
When deleting a file from explorer, most people I know press "del", "enter". The process of deleting a file has become a double action event. Why both asking me to confirm deletion of a file when I can simply undo what I have done? Edit->Undo or a quick visit to the recycling bin resolve my problem.
How about you simply launch the tab group in another browser window? If the user has made a mistake, he can easily close that new browser container and all of those tabs will close.
I, too, love the new Favorites Center. My only suggestion would be integration with favorites.live.com
Great job, Favorites Team! I love the favorites/feeds/history interface. It’s clean and intuitive.
I strongly agree with this sentiment:
"
I think it is illogical to lump favorites, feeds, and history under "favorites center" and by pushing them down one level all you’ve really done is make it so we have to do more clicking to get to where we want to go. Either separate them or at least provide separate buttons that can be added to the toolbar.
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a lot of good has certaintly been done on the favorites system and the team deserves a lot of congratulations. There’s one more feature I’d really love to see in there: quick search of your favorites list.
Basically I’d love to see the feature in firefox of keeping a keeping a search field open at the top of the favorites sidebar. you can then type your search term and it searches the favorites for matches against the search term – and best of all it does live, so as you start to type your search term you can see it automatically shortening your favorites. For me this is an indispensible feature and an essential part of my "web memory". Pretty, pretty please IE team – you’ve done so well thus far. It would be great if you add this feature – then I’d have no reason not to use IE 7 over firefox.
I don’t understand why what I call "bookmarks" are called "favorites" in ie anyway. Not everything that I save for later is one of my favorite things. It’s just something that I want to look at later. Isn’t calling a "thing I want to look at later" a "favorite" just turning language into candy?
I might be missing something but how does one toggle focus between the current tab and the favourites centre? Ctrl-T & Ctrl+Shift+T work only if I have not navigated anywhere in the current tab – i.e. have not scrolled or clicked in the tab page area.
Other than that I’m really liking IE7 – so far so good.
I like the new favorites center but my main issue with it is the history display has a major bug which has been reported by many. For example I currently have today, Tuesday and Monday showing in my history folder. Today displays fine but when you click on Tuesday or Monday nothing happens, the history will not display for those previous time periods. Obviously a MAJOR bug that I hope gets fixed long before the final release.
favorites.live.com integration please!!!
When I want to "add to favorites" and then choose "create in" its almost impossible to locate the right folder to store the site. I have MANY folders and would rather see the folders in a collapsed view.
Also import/export fav’s would be a nice thing.
And search amongst favorites.
I would like to be able to move the favorites center to the right side of the screen, or even to another screen by having it free float.
I downloaded and installed IE 7 yesterday and have enjoyed becoming familiar with it. I had two problems, solved one, but still need help with the second.
First problem: How do you "Refresh" a web page without a "Refresh" button in IE7? Solution: Hit F5. I found that out by reading the Internet Explorer Team Blog (it’s near the top of the blog).
Second Problem: How do you "Sort" your Favorites? I cannot find the answer to this question. I hope someone will post the answer here.
I am very surprised that you cannot search the favorites. I thought search was an important Microsoft focus?!
I really cannot agree on your priorities concerning Favorites. Wouldn’t the absolutely most important thing be to FIND and SORT Favorites, not to delete them using fancy, instant deletebuttons? Here, absolutely nothing has been done.
How many lines of code can it take to make a textbox like in Firefox on top of the favorites list so that the user can find his favorite quickly?
And why is there no way to sort favorites? The first thing that comes to mind is by Date added. That is something I would need daily, and that I sorely miss from firefox/ie. I have 300+ favorites and I use them all the time.
I’m sorry to say it but I really think that while there are a lot of great improvements to IE, when it comes to Favorites you really haven’t done much to help the user be efficient, and even Firefox does it better.
In a post here: http://www.designdelineations.com/design-notes/2006/02/09/ie7-beta-internet-connection-problem/ I mention a connection problem I had initially. No big deal. Problem solved.
What I discovered afterwards, however, was a bit frustrating and I haven’t been able to find any more information on it yet. IE sets itself up as the default feed reader and eclipses my favorite, SharpReader. I have been unable to find a way to change this setting.
Anyone know?
Call them bookmarks. "Bookmark" is the standard term. Not all my "favorites" are favorite sites.
Try not to be special. When everyone is asking for you to impliment standards, whether it be CSS, HTML rendering, anti-aliasing, shell controls, etc you show complete disregard and waste all your time creating "improvements" that only confuse people.
Please show more concern for the needs/wants of your CUSTOMERS… not what you think would be a k00l feature to impliment. That’s why FF will overtake IE.
Discovered a bug:
If you drag a folder (or link) to a new position it inserts in the slot under the item, instead of the slot you point the mouse at.
e.g.:
folder1
folder2
folder3
folder4
move folder4 between folder1 & 2 (black bar shows where it will go)
result:
folder1
folder2
folder4 <<
folder3
forgot to mention: Organise favourites reacts the same way.
Hi, this is Uche again, I am back to talk about Quick Tabs, a visual way of managing tabs in Internet…
Discovered a (sort of) bug with the Favourites Centre…
If you have the Favourites Centre open and docked, and you click a link that causes a popup window (with no tab bar, and IE6 would have had nothing but the web page) then you get the Favourites Centre opened as well. This can throw some pages off if they have explicit window sizes. Also, there is no obvious way to close the Favourites Centre with the mouse on such a page.
Hmmm… Let me see. I can right click the programs list and sort by name. I love that… but in favorites you have to drag and lose the folder or link into the deep abyss… But then maybe being organized isn’t the goal of Favorites. Sheesh, I can’t organize my sock drawer, let alone my favorites… A Sort by Name would be cool… or is there one and I am just that clueless… lol. Hey now, I have been using MS since 3.11. Thanks for read at least.
I like the favorites but can’t seem to get over my links toolbar. And, it seems harder to get things to the links toolbar (drag and drop no longer seems to work). I like the rss feeds, but I too am used to a 3rd party product and will have to see how I like the RSS integration long term.
Please – Add the search options in "Favorites Center"!!!
Thanks
In the History tab, I’d like to see the ability to sort by page title, and it group (tree-style) by common title. Maybe, to avoid problems, doing a check for a common server somewhere within each group.
Sticking to folders in the Favorites rather than meta tags I see as a big opportunity lost. Delicious style tagging would be much better.
Can we please have a close button by the pin button? Already fed up with having to move outside the centre to shut it down.
The Links bar seems to have been ignored. Why doesn’t the hover arrow appear on those folders too? Can we get the RSS feeds to also act like live favourites a la Firefox’s live bookmarks? And it takes up way too much space – have it drop down from the address box like Opera.
I have to say, after hearing the press talk about a big radical redesign for IE7, my first impressions are that the interface is not even close to matching Opera’s design. It even smacks of "we want to do the same, but this is as far as we can go". I’m not a regular Opera user (Firefox for me), but IE looks half hearted in comparison. And Favourites, to use the English spelling, is most of that. Sorry 🙁
(BTW: to contribute to the debate. There is no such thing as UK English. That is simply called English. American English is a subset because it is a variation from the standard. English cannot be a variation from English – so quit putting the "UK" by it.)
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