Sorry I wasn’t able to get this up until now, but I promised I’d have it here within a day of publishing last night’s report (Internet Explorer Feedback).
The IE team has responded to my feedback on their latest beta. Can’t say I’m happy with their answers, but I’m extremely impressed with their transparency, honesty, and ability. Their responses have been italicized below, with the first five responses already online. I figured I wasn’t the only person with these pecadillos, so I wanted to share their answers with everybody…

Okay, I know I didn’t want to get into the UI problems in IE7b3, but the command bar’s Home icon menu items sport a different vertical height than others (like the Print menu). Why… why?! And why does the Quick Tabs button look different than the Home button, even though both of them have drop-down menu items?! The window flashes when I select options in the Favorites Center, WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE WAKE UP OVER THERE?

Home icon menu has different vertical height because we custom draw the menu with two more pixels of height in order to make favicons appear un-cramped. This is the same padding added to the classic Favorites menu or to the All Programs menu in the start menu. However, it does look a little odd for the bottom two items. We’ll investigate if we can use different padding for those items.

Quick tabs button looks different because we wanted to visually associate it with the tabs, since it is a tab management feature that operates on all tabs at once. All of the command bar functions operate on the currently active tab or the browser as a whole. We’re not able to reproduce the window flashing in the favorites center: Can you be more specific about what you mean by “selecting options in the favorites center?” In any event, a great deal of our time for the next few months will be spent on performance and polish issues, so it may be that we’ve already addressed this in internal builds, which is why we’re not seeing it internally.

You still can’t control the specific point size of a default font. IE7 would have you walk through a convoluted process rather than let you, for example, say that you wanted 9pt Courier New for the default fixed width font. That would’ve been too simple, methinks.

Today we do not have a simple UI to change the default font. We pick up the default font of the system. You can change the default font in a couple of different ways. (1) You can change the system font and that changes the default browser font. (2) You can change the default font through a user style sheet (for example you can create a style sheet with “:body {font: Arial 12pt;}” and load it through the accessibility tab under Internet Options). We’re looking into making this easier in a future version.

This particular design was chosen for usability reasons and it tests pretty well for initial usability. We have, however, seen that power users do prefer the checkbox model, so we are investigating changing the design in a future release. As for the name – it’s designed to make sense to the average user. The typical power user (that understands things like URL caches) will figure it out quickly enough, as you have.

Why does the entire window freeze and stall for a second (sometimes) before it closes completely? Seems to be a problem when I have more than one tab open. When I click the close button, the window should disappear instantly. It doesn’t.

There are known issues with third party toolbars causing this phenomenon. All tabs except the last one close quickly and then the last one stutters. IE7 itself frees additional resources when the last tab is closed, so sometimes this does result in a UI stutter as IE closes. It’s usually not very noticeable – much less than half a second. If you can give us some more information about what add-ons you have installed, perhaps we can confirm this for you.

When “ico” files are rendered in the browser, why are they just as aliased around the edges as they were in IE6? Firefox doesn’t have this problem, and Opera doesn’t have this problem… so I’m waiting for a damn good reason why Microsoft can’t fix it.

.ico files contain multiple versions of an icon. IE6 and IE7 both display icons in a web page by picking the first icon in the .ico file. In a future release, we’ll look into making the change to pick the highest-resolution icon in the file. The “good reason” for not fixing this now is simply that we have many more high priority issues to work on in IE7 before looking we can fix issues with rarely-used features. It’s not a great reason, but it’s the truth. If you’re interested, we have some script solutions that you could look into that allow you to open the .ico file and extract whichever version of the icon you’d like to see. Let me know if you’d like me to forward that information.

As noted above, the IE team responded to five other issues. This is great information – and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how IE7 improves before it goes gold.

Freedbacking Internet Explorer

Before you send me an email with constructive feedback for Gnomedex 6.0, I’d encourage you to post your thoughts in this page’s comment thread instead. I’ve listened to a lot of feedback over the past couple of days, doing my best to adjust on-the-fly. I answered a lot of questions one-on-one, too. Still, I wanted a semi-formal way to collect your impressions in a single thread – so that everybody can see what could have gone better, and what went better than expected. I should list twenty things we could improve upon for next year, but I’m really tired and want to sleep for a week first. Feel free to post anonymously if you want, or send trackbacks from your own site to this post. I know we could have done a few better, so it’s not like I’m only looking to hear about the “good stuff.” Ponzi might be putting together a survey soon, too. Until then, don’t hold back – what are your thoughts on this year’s Gnomedex while it’s still fresh in your mind?

Gnomedex Freedbacking

I remember the first time I ever saw WIRED magazine – back when I was pirillc2770@cobra.uni.edu (in the early ’90s). It was pure literary awesomeness. Evan Hansen stumbled upon ‘freedbacking’ somehow, and wanted to know a little more about it. I’m still not sure the idea has legs, but I’ll have a super-simple Freedbacking.com set up some time after Gnomedex. From Are You ‘Freedbacking’?:

Tagging has already proven to be a powerful tool for organizing information on the web, and Pirillo’s twist of using a made-up word with no Google presence to jump-start a new category of conversation is an interesting idea. If enough people go along, Pirillo and others hope, the term could alert developers to feedback that just might make their products better.

Rock on. Evan and I talked about putting a word to there not being a word in Google. It’s not googlewhacking (which is when there’s only one result for a keyword or two). If the word doesn’t exist, and you’re trying to make it a word, shouldn’t it be something like a googlemology? I must note that, as of the time I’m writing this, the word “googlemology” is not showing up in Google. The story is becoming the story. Of course, that’s a googlification of the word “etymology.”

Wired on Wired

I discovered this through preparing my TagJag presentation, prompted by Ken Rossi. If you’ve ever wanted more control of your Flash Player, you have to visit the Flash Player Settings Manager on Adobe’s site. I had no idea this even existed, and I’m baffled why this Flash control panel isn’t embedded directly within the player itself! Change Global and Site-centric Privacy, Storage, Security, and Notification settings. You can get to it from the Macromedia Flash Player Settings “Advanced” button on the Privacy tab, but it’s not nearly as intuitive as what’s found on their Manager page. Adobe, here’s a bit of freedbacking for you!

Tweak Flash Player Settings

Just had my session on Users at Bloggercon. I wasn’t sure how it went, but several people came up to me afterwards and told me that they really appreciated that – it was a psychotherapeutic session, enabling users to complain about software (why it doesn’t work, why it’s messed up, how they wish it could be better).

So, in my effort to make this world a little better – fostering open feedback between users and developers, I’m creating a new tag that doesn’t exist in Google (which means it doesn’t yet exist): Freedbacking. Tag it, use it, share it. I’ll post a unified feed for the keyword as soon as our OPML-to-RSS script is ready, but don’t let that stop anybody from posting to their own space (read: blog) using the word “Freedbacking” somewhere within a post. You’re giving free feedback to the developers of your favorite programs, or the creators of your favorite Web service, or anybody who’s making something that you use (or want to use, or need to use). Become a freedbacker – say something! Tell them they’re not doing something right – tell them how they could make their product even better – tell them what you want! Users own the word: Freedbacking, labeling the art of offering free (constructive) feedback.

And in case you missed it, this is a call-to-action for ALL users. I’ll be “freedbacking” when I get back to my hotel room after the conference.

Freedbacking