February 09, 2006

Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout

IE7: Favorites And Feeds

By Ed Bott, Scot Finnie, Dennis Fowler, and Ron White

Courtesy of InternetWeek

Page 5 of 18

Favourites And Feeds
Internet Explorer's rudimentary tools for keeping track of your favourite Web sites haven't changed much in the past nine years, and neither have those of its rivals. IE7 adds a new, smarter approach to this essential task, consolidating the previous mishmash of menus and sidebars into a single pane called the Favourites Centre.

The Favourites Centre button, a white star in a pale yellow circle, sits unobtrusively below the Back and Forward buttons. Click it once to display the Favourites Centre as a menu that disappears after you make a selection and click in the browser window. You can also dock the Favourites Centre along the left side of the browser window for full-time access. To add a Web site (or an entire group of tabs) to the list of favourites, click the Add/Subscribe button.

The Favourites Centre lets you access your Favourites, RSS Feeds, and History list. (Click image to enlarge and to see the Image Gallery.)

Two of the three views of the Favourites Centre will be familiar to any long time user of Internet Explorer. Click the Favourites button to rearrange the order of shortcuts and organize them into folders, or click History to view and search pages you've previously visited.

The real star of the Favourites Centre, though, is the new Feeds button, which turns Internet Explorer into a full-strength RSS reader. Here's how it works:

1. When you visit a Web page that contains an auto-discoverable feed in RSS or Atom format, IE7 lights up the orange Feeds button. Click that button to open the feed in the browser window (if the site has more than one feed available, you can choose from all available feeds by clicking the drop-down arrow). You can also click directly on an orange XML icon or any link to an XML-formatted feed. The formatted feed page opens in the browser window, with a block of explanatory text at the top of the page.

2. Click the plus sign to subscribe to the feed. This action adds a link to the Favourites Centre and configures the feed for automatic synchronization.

3. Right-click the feed icon in the sidebar and choose Properties to configure options. You can rename the feed's shortcut, control the frequency of synchronization (once a day is the default), specify whether to download enclosures such as podcast files, and tell IE how many items to keep in its cache for each feed.

When you revisit a feed after subscribing, you can use the box on the right of the page to sort and search feeds or to show only those you haven't yet read. If the site author has tagged posts with categories, you can filter the list by category as well. Or create your own filter by entering any text into the search box.

Page 6: IE7: Killer Features

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18