But Not Much Is New
By Rob Safuto on Oct 20, 2006 in RSS, Social Media | Tags: Browser , Firefox , IE7 , Microsoft , Mossberg , RSS , Wall-Street-Journal , WSJ
Internet Explorer 7 is out and it includes some nifty features that allow people to discover and subscribe to RSS feeds in the browser. I’ve been testing the beta for months and recognized that the RSS functionality is a very important new feature.
Apparently Walt Mossberg from The Wall Street Journal doesn’t think so. I read a story about the new browser launch on Thursday and their was no mention of RSS features within the browser. And the title of the story included the same words in my title.
How do you call a major shift in support for RSS “not much” as far as what’s new? Maybe Walt will give me an answer. Maybe not. But I think that the move to support RSS subscription within the brower is something new. And it is much!
For the record, I do 90% of my browsing with Firefox, which I love. But many people use IE and will continue to do so. I think that they have the right to hear about this feature and explore it for themselves.
If you haven’t seen the new features you should head over to the Learning Center to check out the video tutorial on Managing RSS With IE7. There you’ll see just how easy it is to subscribe to and manage RSS feeds with IE7.
[tags]Social Media, RSS, Browser, Microsoft, IE7, Firefox, Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, WSJ[/tags]
Tim Anderson | Oct 20, 2006 | Reply
While I agree that RSS is a major feature (especially the underlying RSS platform) I feel IE7 is flawed as an RSS client.
See here for details:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=24
Tim
Rob Safuto | Oct 20, 2006 | Reply
I took a spin over to your post to see your point of view on the new features. You’re making the point that the feed reading capabilities are way too basic for someone who is an experienced RSS user. This is true.
As an experienced RSS user myself I have no plans on abandoning my current tools for the features in IE7. The new RSS user might see it differently. I think that the features in IE7 are good enough to get someone interested in reading feeds. As those people get more into feeds its likely that they will want to move on to more robust RSS tools.
Tim Anderson | Oct 20, 2006 | Reply
Thanks Rob. I agree that IE7 makes it easy to subscribe, and I hope that increases RSS usage. To my mind that doesn’t excuse some basic usability issues.
Tim