RSS Features in IE 7 for XP and Windows Vista Beta 1

Hi! I’m Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer. Now that Beta 1 of IE 7 for Windows XP and Windows Vista are released, I want to introduce to you to what RSS features that are available in this release.

We also posted this information to the IE blog, for those who don't read both.

IE 7 Beta 1 includes initial support for discovery and reading RSS feeds. In Beta 1, we’re calling them “web feeds.” We’re still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds, so if you have any ideas or opinions, please post to comments.

Discovering Web feeds

With previous versions of IE, it’s pretty tough to know when a web page has a web feed available. With IE 7 Beta 1, the header of the web page is scanned to see if the publisher has associated a web feed with that page. If a web feed is found, the web feed button on the toolbar lights up. In addition, the user can configure a sound to play when a feed is found, and the same of list of feeds associated with the page can be found under the Tools menu.

Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release.

In a later post, I’ll describe how publishers can set up their pages to make this button “light up.”

There are a few settings on the Content tab of the Internet Options control panel (accessible via Tools, Internet Options) that let you turn on and off feed discovery, and make a few tweaks to its behavior.

Basic viewing of a web feed

When you click on a link to a web feed in IE 6 today you’ll see a very colorful, but ultimately not very useful view of the feed. With IE 7, we detect when a page is really a web feed, and we display a view of the feed that’s much easier to read. You can even add the web feed as a favorite for quick access, right from the page.

Here’s a web feed before IE7:

Here’s IE 7 Beta 1:

That’s the quick tour through the IE RSS features of Beta 1. For this release, we were laying the groundwork for the additional features to come. There’ll be more in Beta 2, both in IE and with the RSS Platform we talked about at Gnomedex, so keep an eye on the blog for updates.

- Jane

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 02, 2005
  There's a certificate error for this page.
  
  I got a marvellous alert in IE7 that the page "contains both secure and and non-secure content".
  
  That's a very handy security alert there. Short, simple and uncomplicated.
  
  btw, your Feeds for this blog do not get formatted!

• Anonymous
  August 02, 2005
  Hi. i write here because something is happening with the connect.m..... to post my feedback.. It Will be great if you can add skins to the rss reader. By default the blue color skin to read the rss contents and no the XML is great but personalization for this will be great.

• Anonymous
  August 02, 2005
  Just a few questions...
  Does the 'Basic viewing of a web feed' can be disabled? I think some technical users might want to see it as-it-is.
  Does the 'Basic viewing of a web feed' apply only to web feeds or, in general, to all XML files?

• Anonymous
  August 03, 2005
  Simone - If you want to see the XML version of the feed, you can right-click on the page and select "View Source." You'll see the original XML in whatever editor you've configured.
  
  Ruben- We'd love to add customization to the feed view. We know people want it, but we may not get to that feature in this release.
  
  Thanks for the feedback!
  
  -Sean

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2005
  I just want to cast my vote too for customizable RSS views. It's that type of flexibility that will fuel wide-spread use of the RSS features in IE7. Another must is to have an easy way to build a list of favorite feeds, and with one click on the name of that list in my Favorites menu, load up each of those feed views in a separate new tab.
  
  On another note, I just implemented the recommendations from the "Windows RSS Publisher's Guide, Part 1" for my blog, 'Officer Joe's Vista Patrol' ( http://vistapatrol.blogspot.com ).
  Thanks for the very helpful and detailed guide.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2005
  Thanks~

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2005
  Hi, Firts off, Great work!. I love the RSS support. But I seem to have some issues with some common RSS feeds. I am trying to get NASA feeds. They are compliant and are RSS 2.0. but neither IE7 nor Vista Beta 1 or 2 and the RSS Gadget can seem to read them. The feeds in question are here http://www.nasa.gov/rss/index.html
  
  Are there still some issues with support for the common RSS .9, 1.0 or 2.0?

• Anonymous
  January 08, 2006
  Apparently it's still a bug. It doesn't recognize RSS correctly yet.
  
  As you can see even here (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/Rss.aspx), while other feeds work fine like this (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/iemvp.xml).
  
  But this last one uses an XSL called RssPretty.xslt.

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2006
  Sean...
  
  We'd love to add customization to the feed view. We know people want it, but we may not get to that feature in this release.
  
  Easy. just honor any xsl stylesheets that are found (you already do it in IE.6)

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2006
  Hi I was wondering if we have any RSS add-ins for IE6. Any beta or rlease version for IE6 would be of great help.
  
  Thanks.

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2006
  Basically nothing seems worth thinking about. I haven't been up to much these days. I just don't have much to say right now. I can't be bothered with anything , but whatever.

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2006
  I've just been staying at home not getting anything done. I've basically been doing nothing worth mentioning. My life's been pretty unremarkable these days. Eh.

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  I can't be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don't care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I've just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that's how it is.

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2006
  Not much on my mind these days, but what can I say? It's not important. I just don't have much to say lately. I've just been letting everything pass me by recently, but eh.

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2006
  I've just been staying at home not getting anything done. I've basically been doing nothing worth mentioning. My life's been pretty unremarkable these days. Eh.

• Anonymous
  May 26, 2006
  I can't be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don't care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I've just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that's how it is.

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2006
  I haven't been up to much these days. Today was a loss. Nothing seems important. I've just been letting everything happen without me these days.

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  My life's been basically bland today. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. My mind is like an empty room. I've more or less been doing nothing to speak of. Not much on my mind recently.

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  Good design!

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  Well done!

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  Well done!

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  Nice site!

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2006
  My life's been basically bland today. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. My mind is like an empty room. I've more or less been doing nothing to speak of. Not much on my mind recently.

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2006
  Well done!

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2008
  PingBack from http://blogrssblog.info/microsoft-rss-blog-rss-features-in-ie-7-for-xp-and-windows-vista-beta-1/

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2008
  Hi! I’m Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer. Now that Beta 1 of IE 7 for Windows XP and Windows Vista are released, I want to introduce to you to what RSS features that are available in this release. We also posted this information