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http://live.pirillo.com/ – I have been trying for years to get my parents to switch to Firefox. They still use IE, even though they complain about it a lot. Mom was recently wondering how to get rid of all those saved searches in IE 7.

My mom has a new blog. She does a lot of researching to find things to help her in her writing. Apparently, her search history in IE7 has gotten quite large, and she’s wanting to clean it out some.

Being me, I figured this is a simple matter. Open IE, go to Tools>Internet Options>General tab. Under browsing, click the delete button, which opens up the dialoge box. There you have options to clear cookies, cache, form data, passwords…. but no search history? What the heck?

Apparently, in order to clear that search data in the box, you have to delete all form data. This includes websites you’ve asked to save your name, usernames, etc. You know… that whole “auto complete” thing we all use to save us time. What if I don’t want to delete all that though? In that case, I can manually go through that form data, and delete things I don’t want one by one. This will, of course, take a very long time if there’s a lot there.

Well, mom… just one more reason you should be using Firefox.

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• The Community Speaks out About Google Chrome
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• Freedbacking Internet Explorer
• Time Management!?
• IE Makes it Impossible to Troubleshoot Feeds
• What Drives Your Productivity?
• Are You Ready for the Holidays?
• Microsoft Office 2010 Comparison Screencast

It’ll crash if you look at it wrong, but at least we’ll soon have Safari on Windows (no thanks to Apple). Get Swift if you’d like to take a look, but don’t hold your breath for an amazing experience. It’s going to take a year or so before Swift gets stable enough to use as an alternative to your already-alternative browser. Why we still have to deal with Safari at this point is beyond me. It’s tough enough dealing with the inconsistences between Opera, IE7, and FireFox! I only know three people who use Safari in OS X by default, and they live in a mental institution. If you use Safari, too – please tell your sanitarium buddies I said “Hello.”

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• What Browser do you Use?
• Freedbacking Internet Explorer
• Blake Ross
• IE Makes it Impossible to Troubleshoot Feeds
• Could all of Life’s Conveniences be Killing Us?
• What’s a Browser User-Agent String?

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.

The “Delete Browsing History” dialog is still a kludge compared to the Firefox one. What’s the fear in making it work just as well – if not better – than the competition’s? Initially, I was also confused by the labeling of this feature – believing it only pertained to my URL cache. They should be using another word instead of History. Might I suggest… “Delete Browsing Social Studies?”

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.

• Safari on Windows
• How to Improve Internet Explorer
• How to Change the Skins in Firefox (Personas!)
• What’s a Browser User-Agent String?
• Google Chrome for Mac OS X
• How to Sync Bookmarks Across Multiple Browsers
• Clear Search in IE History
• Blake Ross
• IE Makes it Impossible to Troubleshoot Feeds
• How to Get Feedback for Your Web Site via Twitter

I don’t want to be snarky about this – I really don’t. But since we’re at Beta 3 stage with Internet Explorer 7.0, it’s time to unleash the bitching. I’m not expecting any more features to be added to this version, but I am expecting a lot more spit and polish before IE7 is officially unleashed. If ever there was a time to be critical, it’s now.

1. I still get prompted when I want to create a shortcut to my desktop – by right-clicking the page and choosing “Create Shortcut.” Yes, I want to create a shortcut – don’t ask me again!!! Dean, please add a toggle for this annoyance.
2. You still get prompted when dragging and dropping an item from the browser to the desktop. “Do you want to move or copy files from this zone?” Yes, I do – or I wouldn’t have tried it in the first place, you fool. There’s no clear or easy way of eliminating this prompt, other than applying this registry hack.
3. The information bar has got to go. It was annoying in IE6, and it’s even more annoying in IE7. I tried opening information from a trusted desktop app, and IE7 infobar’ed me – then when I told the infobar that it was okay, IE reloaded and showed me another warning dialog – just in case I missed it the first time. This is absolute madness. Let’s not even go into how the information bar reloads the entire page when you want to download a file from a URL! You have to make this far less annoying before going gold, Dean.
4. I really, REALLY don’t want to go into all the UI inconsistencies, though the page properties icon is an old one, the History icon looks ass-nasty, and the Print Preview dialog is using Arial and a non-standard toolbar in Classic Mode. I could easily turn this into a “top 100″ list if I broke down all the ways that the IE7 UI is still rough around the edges.
5. Why on God’s green earth is the RSS icon in the toolbar?! It’s a modal icon – meaning it should only show up when there’s something there to see! Safari puts an RSS icon in the address bar, Opera puts an syndication icon in the address bar, and we all know that Firefox puts it in the address bar as well. Who thinks they’re being innovative by putting the indicator in a place where most people will ignore it?
6. 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?
7. 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.
8. The “Delete Browsing History” dialog is still a kludge compared to the Firefox one. What’s the fear in making it work just as well – if not better – than the competition’s? Initially, I was also confused by the labeling of this feature – believing it only pertained to my URL cache. They should be using another word instead of History. Might I suggest… “Delete Browsing Social Studies?”
9. 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.
10. 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.

Despite these snags, IE7 is certainly a better Web browser than IE6. I’m not even close to switching from Maxthon 1.x (though I don’t like the way Maxthon 2.x is shaping up). The Firefox faithful won’t be returning to the Internet Explorer brand anytime soon, either. IE7 puts Microsoft back into the game; they’ve fixed hundreds of known bugs and added a small amount of “new” features. My question is: will IE8 blow us away – or just blow?

• Remove the IE Drag & Drop Prompt
• The Feed Icon Debate
• Clear Search in IE History
• Safari on Windows
• Robert and Robert: Duh!
• Freedbacking Internet Explorer
• Windows Vista: Lipstick on a Pig
• Time Management!?
• IE Makes it Impossible to Troubleshoot Feeds

I have too many things I need to do, and I’ve got no time to do ‘em all. I’ve had so many late nights in the past week, it’s not even funny. Didn’t even have a chance to check my email until 11am today! I stayed up last night working on helping the Outlook team, but I still have a few more things I need to tweak in this site’s template. As I mentioned in last night’s report, I just got the Gateway computer – so I spent most of my time on the Vista laptop while waiting for files to copy from one machine to the other. I’ve gotta get everything set up for me on the new machine, knowing that I’ll be getting an even newer one soon enough (AMD-based, likely an FX-60). Time Mangement? I don’t need management, I just need more time to do the things I’ve gotta do. It’ll be another late night tonight as well – with the weekend coming up (promising to be filled with an even heavier workload). My emails are stacking up, too; if you sent me a note in the past day or so, don’t expect a response until I can get Outlook 2000 up and running again later this afternoon after I do a hit on on10. Oh, and… I wouldn’t even consider using IE7 on Vista. It’s Firefox until I can copy over my copy of Maxthon. When I get time… when I find time…

• Clear Search in IE History
• Safari on Windows
• Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner
• IE Makes it Impossible to Troubleshoot Feeds
• Who Loves Windows Vista?
• How to Disable the UAC in Windows Vista
• What Does Windows 7 Bring to the Table?
• Virtual Machines Love Windows 7
• Don’t Believe Everything You Read
• Windows 7 – Better for Gamers?

This morning, a subscriber notified us that one of our master feeds was broken. I loaded ‘er up in IE, only to (once again) be faced with cripped pieces of feedback. Yes, the browser shows me part of the error, but doesn’t actually tell me where the error is! Without some form of context, I have to dig deeper. Screw that. I have to fire up FireFox just to learn more about a problem. IE7 better be better on the code troubleshooting front. In related news, our new forums output RSS for searches. The server is definitely being brought to its knees, but we’re getting another one in place ASAP. You want proof? You can’t handle the proof.

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• How Do You Enlarge Web Site Fonts for Printing?
• How to Sync Bookmarks Across Multiple Browsers
• Favorite Firefox Extensions
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