At time of writing, there are 644 comments on the announcement of IE7. It was exciting, then, to have Dean send me a note of thanks for my comment. After all – he’s “the guy responsible for IE” – and it just goes to show how much better things are when you glimpse the people behind the bland press releases. Blogs are good for the customer, good for the company and good for the employees. Which is a rare thing.
Anyways, that wasn’t the point of this post. All I wanted to do was lay out my little laundry list of things I want for IE7. You probably have your own, and here’s a fairly long one, but hey. It’s my blog. I doubt they have time to implement all of this, but if you don’t ask – you don’t get.
– Tabbed browsing – I cannot surf without it, I even managed to install Firefox at school to get it.
– Standards – It doesn’t have to be perfect, but please fix the *existing* bugs with CSS at least, which tie my site up in knots sometimes.
– Anti-Phising – I don’t know what the answer is, but something has to be done. International Domain Names especially – good thing IE doesn’t support them yet! 
– RSS – I love Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, depend on them daily, but I have a feeling it could be even better. And no, I don’t want an RSS reader or some complicated add-on system.
– Transparent PNG – Enough has been said about this already so I won’t bother to repeat it all here. Bottom line: we need it IE!
– Spell Checking – Firefox has a great extension for it, and I’m awful at spelling. Help me IE!
– Favicons – OK, it’s not that important, but I wanted to end on a light note!
These are the big things that jump out to me, as an end-user. If I tried I’m sure I could come up with dozens more, and I’m sure somebody could point me towards a suitable Firefox extension for every single one. There’s no doubt that in terms of features, Firefox is streets ahead. So why do I care about IE7? Why not just stick with what works?
The answer is because I really like Windows XP. I like the way it works in so many areas, so it really pains me to see it shipping with an out of date browser with so many glaring flaws. Think about it – even Media Player went from version 8 to 10. IE should be the centrepiece of Windows, and as I said on the IE Team blog, I want Microsoft to go out and build the best damn browser they can.
And of course, what better motivation could there be for the Firefox guys to keep going strong than a little competition from their old rival?
Let competition commence!
Spellcheckers work great, but aren’t everything:
– Anti-Phising – I don’t know what the answer is, but something has to be done. International Domain Names especially – good
think
IE doesn’t support them yet!
believe it should be thing
You’re just a little proof-reader aren’t you?
As always – many thanks!
lol, the sad thing is I have nothing better to do
Must say that tabbed browsing is very usefull, it saves all those other windows clogging up the taskbar.
I’d like to see this, and favicons in IE as well
Google taskbar is quite good
I can’t browse without tabs anymore, favicons are great elements in site design,live bookmarks are brilliant, stylesheets always display pages better in firefox and the same aplies to
PNGs, so gotta agree ith you on all those points!
Whatters?
Ug, my brain can’t take all this!
lol, just get Dom to expain it all to you some rainy day
And yeah, Live bookmarks, thats another good one i’d like to see in IE, and the Built in search in the taskbar is handy, saves all this clutter you can get when using something like the Google toolbar.
Thank’s Rob!