Clear my Tracks: yes please!!!!

Article
01/12/2006

First let me introduce myself. My name is Uche Enuha and I am a recent college graduate hire to the Internet Explorer team. I am a Program Manager working on the User Experience team.
Now to the main point. There is a new feature in IE7 called ‘Delete Browsing History’ that gives users an easy way to control the data stored by the browser.I am going to answer the three main questions that I think are going through your heads right now, I’ll let you meditate on the information and allow the excitement to naturally evolve.

Why would I use this feature?
I am glad you asked this question. Let’s look at an example of how this feature can be used. So you’re trying to buy a gift for your loved one and you know how important it is to keep this mission secret. You’re aware of every site you visit but your machine is aware of even more; the stuff you type, the information you read, even the cookies requested by the site where you eventually buy the gift. You realize how important it is that your loved one never gets hold of any of this information. So you do what we all would, you try and cover your tracks. Now back in IE6, you would have to spend a lot of time looking through various places on your computer to get rid of all the relevant information and possibly still miss some critical information. Now with the ‘Delete Browsing History’ feature, we are giving every person the ability to clear all their browsing information from one location with a click of a button and, the peace of mind that the job was done right.

What does this feature really do?
It deletes the following items which are split into five categories, listed below:

Temporary Internet Files: Downloaded files cached on the client for quick access
- Temporary Internet Files cached for quick access
- Cached files containing Offline favorites
- Information stored by other applications in the Temporary Internet Files folder (e.g. attachment files stored by Outlook)
Cookies: Information persisted by the client on behalf of the server
- Cookies
- XML Userdata cache
History: website addresses (URLs) stored to enable History/most recently used website addresses
- Typed website addresses used for Addressbar Autocomplete
- The list of most recently used website addresses in the Run… dialog
- URL History entries (excluding ones marked as Offline Favorites)
- Stored value for Encoding (Code Page)
Form Data: User-entered personal data stored by the client
- AutoComplete form data
Passwords: User-entered personal data stored by the client
- AutoComplete password data

(Please note, if you’re part of a domain in a corporate environment, an administrator has the ability to disable certain aspects of this feature.)

The User Interface for this feature provides information about what exactly these types of information are and gives the user the ability to individually delete each type of information or delete all information at once. Here’s what the main dialog looks like:

Delete Browsing History dialog

As an added bonus, if cleaning up is taking a while, a cancellable progress dialog is shown. You can ignore the dialog and go back to the browser (or even close it) – the process will continue in the background until it’s done. No more sitting around waiting for your 200MB cache to be emptied!

Where can we find this great feature?
Just go to the Tools menu and you’ll see ‘Delete Browsing History…’. Or whilst you’re in the internet options dialog, you can find this feature under the General tab in the Browsing history section cleverly disguised as the ‘Delete…’ button.

So there you have it. ‘Delete Browsing History…’ will be coming to a computer near you very shortly. Use it and enjoy it. Think of it as your friend that has your back and covers your tracks.

-Uche

Comments

Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Why don't you make it a checklist? If I want to delete everything but the cookies, it would still be many clicks to do.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Exactly, I almost never want to clear all of those items at once, sometimes just the history and cache, not cookies and etc. There should be options, a checklist, etc.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
This is great! :) Thanks a lot. This page always helps me with something (one of the reasons I still use IE...)
<a href="http://r2000.blogspot.com">R2K</a>
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I agree with geoff. It would be great to be able to permanently exclude some cookies from the erasure list (my.yahoo, amazon, blogger, etc.), some cookes do serve a valuable purpose, after all. It would also be kewl to be able to block cookies on a site-by-site basis (adsomething, tracksomething, etc.) or even be able to import a list (like an email filter list) of blocked cookies.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Well it's about time you finally posted something new in this blog, so thanks for that. I'm glad this sort of "new" functionality is being made available for IE7, but there's just a couple of things I'm concerned about.

First of all it's not new, don't make it sound like this is some revolutionary new feature you've invented and IE7 will be the first browser to incorporate it. I've been using this sort of functionality in other browsers for a long time.

Also why on earth did you call it "Clear Browsing History"? If there's one way to confuse users with this feature then you're on the right track. Seriously, people are going to think they're only deleting their... history, also known as the last pages they visited.

Here's a suggestion, how about calling it "Clear Private Data", or "Clear Saved Data", or "Clear Stored Data", or even "Clear My Tracks"?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<It would also be kewl to be able to block cookies on a site-by-site basis (adsomething, tracksomething, etc.) or even be able to import a list (like an email filter list) of blocked cookies.>>

IE6 and above already offer this feature, although I agree that it's a bit tricky to use.
This feature is documented here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/security/privacy/customimportxml/customimportxml.asp

This feature allows you to block cookies, downgrade permanent cookies to session cookies, et. cetera.

-Eric
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I'm glad to hear that the problem with the UI becoming unresponsive has been fixed. How about the issue of "gunk" left over in side of the Temporary Internet Files folder? Even after I use "Delete Files", my TIF folder still is over 100 MB, and contains lots of "orphaned" files that will never be deleted. I have to go to a command prompt and manually go through all the folders and delete the cruft. Has this been taken care of?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Ron has a point, though I don't think Clear Browsing History is that unclear. Also, will this REALLY clear the history? Today, in IE, when you clear history, there are still telltale tracks left in various index files and such. Will this REALLY clear the data from the machine, or will it just clear some of it?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
This is a good idea - the only two things that have been added that can't be done now is
Forms Data
Passwords

But under Internet Options in the current IE6 you can- however - delete the first three - and usually when the Cookies are deleted the passwords are too.

One question - when the Temporary Internet Files are Deleted - are they REALLY Deleted Permanently and can never be recovered?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<How about the issue of "gunk" left over in side of the Temporary Internet Files folder? >>

PatriotB: Yup, this should be removed as well. (This is what was meant by "Information stored by other applications in the Temporary Internet Files folder (e.g. attachment files stored by Outlook)")
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<Also, will this REALLY clear the history? Today, in IE, when you clear history, there are still telltale tracks left in various index files and such.>>

If you can find this data in any index files, we want to hear about it. We worked to specifically address that issue.

Do note that these are generally file-deletions and not cryptographically secure drive wipes. If your loved one happens to work for the NSA, you'll want to wipe the freespace on your drive using

cipher /w:C:

after running the Delete Browsing History feature.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Doesn't firefox offer this already...? Someone had to mention that other browser, right ;)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Love this question you have to ask yourself in the blog.

"Why would I use this feature?"

We already do in other browsers. More delay, and more fluff in getting your product out.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"This is a good idea - the only two things that have been added that can't be done now is
Forms Data
Passwords"

You can delete these in IE6 by going Tools > Options > Content > AutoComplete. It is nice that IE7 will bring all these things together.

EricLaw: To experiment, I just did a clear of my cache (I'm using IE6) to see what's left behind. After deleting, my Content.IE5 folder is 52.3 MB, 1633 files. Most don't appear to fall into the "Outlook attachment"-type category. Here's a rundown:
- Lots of 0-byte files that are named [1], [2], [3], etc.
- A bunch of wbkXXX.tmp files
- Lots of variously-named files that contain the contents of res://shdoclc.dll/http_404.htm
- Files that came from ordinary web surfing
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Looking forward to this actually doing what it should have done all along by deleting the index.dat files. Besides the privacy concerns there are drive space issues as well: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=322916
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Thank you. I am really looking forward to this. IE6 did a terrible job at this and left many traces of private data. That was one of my main reasons for giving up on IE and adopting Firefox. Because of this "improvement", I'll give IE7 another chance. Hopefully it'll do a much better job than before at clearing all of the private data. I got tired of doing it manually multiple times every day.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Another possible variation that would be cool, (if we are only left with blanket options to remove all or none) is give us an option to say 'don't delete anything that pertains to sites in my trusted sites list'.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Now to actually be one step ahead of Firefox, you really do need the 'Clear my tracks since I started IE' option, or since IE is so core to the OS and that might be like guessing when it will ship, perhaps since a time.

That way you can remove just the Gift purchase tracks, not everything else which you probably really want to keep.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I agree with Roland, if I saw a close button next to another button I would instinctively click the button that doesn't say Close, because when you make a change to something and you want to keep it you don't hit close/cancel. Even though the changes are immediate, having a button to the left of Close would imply the other button means OK.

Then again maybe it would be better if we could test this, like now... soon, maybe?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I wish I could right click on url's in the address bar and have the option to delete them. Some are one time things or things I don't want kept in there for various reasons. It's a pain to have to delete them all and resave them all. I know that I could just save 'em to my favorites, but what's the sense of favoriting them when I can just grab 'em from the address bar. It's far more convenient for my 5-10 most visited sites.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Will this clear the index.dat file (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index.dat) or it's equivalent?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Forgive my ignorance, but I still can't understand how deleting even 200mb of cached items can take that long, let alone 100mb.

Sometimes it's just painful to have IE sit there while you're deleting the cache via the dialogue. I can just as easily have a shortcut to the folder, hit CTRL+A, DEL and hit enter and have all of the files deleted almost instantly.

Why does it take that long to delete?

BTW, I'm very happy that this feature is available in the next version. I clear my cache quite frequently while developing to this is going to help a lot.

Keep up the great work! I can't wait to see this all done and released!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
how about adding "Delete Browsing History" on the IE icon when right clicking it and automatically delete all information at once.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@geoff: Just my thought ;-)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Now all we need is an "Auction tracker", and "a saved website"-feature, like in Apple's Internet Explorer
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Feature request: "Delete history for this session only" ?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
It is very useful to create a filter, such as always keep yahoo, amazon cookies.
On the status bar, has an indicator, whether cookie or history is recorded, and click it the delete dialog will popup. Right click it, categoried delete menu will popup.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"I have always wanted in browsers is a simple "clear cache" button, which allows me to reload a website including any changed CSS or JavaScript files."

---------------------------------

I might be wrong but doesn't Ctrl + F5 do this?

James
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Am I the only one who has noticed a typo in the screenshot?

coughcough* History
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Steven, I don't see any typo...
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
First up, I think this could be a useful feature, particularly for situations where you're selling a PC and want to take a "scorched earth" approach to covering your tracks. Personally I tend to be more selective (and I use separate profiles for privacy), but I'm not a typical user, so that's not an issue.

As some advice though, I do echo Roland's concern about the "Delete All" being in the same place as the "OK" button. When I was at my last job, the boss called me over to ask how he could empty out his cache to free up some space on his hard drive. So, I showed him how to do that, and also explained the other options while I was there. When it came to the "Clear Passwords" option, I started to say "If you click that button it will delete all your saved passwords, so you probably don't want to do that" but I only got as far as "If you click that button" before he clicked it. He was then rather annoyed with me, since he couldn't remember the passwords to all the websites he used, so I've been careful to phrase things differently ever since ("Don't click on that button for now, because...").

If people do choose to delete passwords (directly or indirectly), I think it would help to change the wording on the confirmation dialog. So, rather than just repeating the original question ("Delete form passwords?"), say something like "Are you sure that you can remember all the passwords you'll need?"

And Steve, I don't see any typos in the screenshot - either one of us is going blind, or they've corrected it already...
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"visted"?

Also, much of the "descriptive" text is pretty terse. It looks like it was written by a developer, rather than by somebody keen on making a useful and intuitive user interface. To all dialog window writers: articles are your friend.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Joal > Yes Firefox does this since 1.5. And the UI for this feature is better in FF IMHO.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@ IE developers

I am currently developing a small CLI tool for deleting user traces. I seek advice on how to programmatically delete IE's AutoForm data. Since this data is stored under HKCU/Protected Storage System Provider it is difficult for me to get access to it. (ok, that's probably intentional).

Is there any official way for ISVs to access the Windows Protected Storage System or does/will IE expose some APIs to clean that data?

Another recent question which I would like to ask the IE developers is how to create an IE instance in a separate process and automate it afterwards. CoCreateInstance is a very nice thing but it reuses existing IE processes for launching new instances. Is there any way to force CoCreateInstance spawning a new process each time it is called?

I am asking these questions here because I have not found adequate answers on the Web.

Thanks

Viktor
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
i think there are two features that need to be here. One is the uber version of "Delete Temporary Files", which has those 47 buttons.

The other feature i want is "Privacy Mode" that prevents ie from storing anything until i turn it off.

i agree with above comments. Clearing my history, and passwords is a pretty destructive operation, which is quite overkill just to hide the fact that i spent the last 5 minutes at a gift site.

In fact, the fact that my history, cache, address-bar dropdown quick lists etc are all empty is evidence enough that i was doing something i didn't want people to see.

If someone sees that your XP start menu quick list is empty is evidence enough that you were trying to hide something.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
New blog entry, yay. There are just a few quick points that I would like to make. Firstly, I would to expand very slightly on the custamisation feature that has been asked for with the 'delete all' option at the bottom(which I definetly agree there should be - let the people choose exactly what info is removed when they hit that button). This allowing people to set when IE 7 does it for you automatically. It would be nice if you could choose from options like automatically delete all history'..... 'upon start up', 'upon shut down', or after x number of days.
Equally the 'private browsing' option that has been suggested would be nice, so you can stop IE 7 storing any of the info mentioned for that session, regardless of your whatever your regular setting are. This I feel could be implimented in a very simple, user-friendly way, eg. in much the same way as the current 'work offline' function is implimeted today, simply as a tickable option in one of the drop down menus, but this would odviously stay ticked all through your browsing session.
Any other comments would simply continue to echoe what has already been said by others, so far. With that in mind, I'd just like to say that you have a good new feature here, which has the potential to be even better with some additional work.
Just keep following this blog, as there seem to be a lot of good feedback coming through from it.

Thanks.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Nick Davis's feature request would be a great addition. He's right that browsing history is useful and you don't want to erase the whole thing just to get rid of a few sites.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Dialog TYPO:
i never VISTED any websites, ever!
^^^^^^

Gordon
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Although I can see the similarities with Firefox's new "Clear Private Data" tool, I still commend theteam for bringing this tool to IE.

There is a typo in the history section, but I'm sure this will be fixed before IE 7 is shipped.

As for the IE gunk, I agree that IE's file and history cleaning tools never actually delete all files. There are always randomly named folders full of copies of websites and images, as well as large downloads, audio and videos. There are also index.dat files that cannot be deleted. Will these be cleared by the new tool?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hi IETeam,

this feature is clearly needed.
You won´t get much credit for this because it´s mandatory.

But why in the world you don´t include a DoD-wiping process?

For an ITPro it´s easy to restore deleted Data.
And sometimes when i want real privacy the best way would to remove the harddrive and put it in the fireplace. That can´t be..

So what´s with wiping and what about the indexing files where are there tracks stored too?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"Why don't you make it a checklist? If I want to delete everything but the cookies, it would still be many clicks to do."

i also want to delete everything except cookies. firefox has this feature and if i'm gonna switch ie7 needs to have this feature
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003

I think this is a very valuable feature and look forward to using it!

While we are on the topic of history, I have mocked up a different history usage model for IE. The URL is http://www.slickscreen.com , it displays history much like your Tivo.

IMHO, I think it is more valuable to see "the past" like you actually saw it (and not just links to pages that can have different content). Not saying that the latter isn't valuable, but both models are valuable imo!

IE Team: Please consider putting this record/playback functionality into IE (before Google or Firefox does it and it is called "innovative") I don't remember anyone calling NetCaptor innovative for developing "tabbed browsing" 7 years ago :)

Keep up the good work!

Brian Duperrouzel
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Wow, It's amazing, but not surprising, to see a bunch o people so completely out of touch with reality. Clue for the IE team, you guys are MS's right fielders - you know, the guys that were picked last and put in a position where it was expected that the ball would never be hit to them. MS has to have an IE, to save face, but nobody on earth, except (maybe) you guys, believes it is a product that matters anymore.

This will be good experience for you guys (who apparently go straight from college to PM) for when you go on to jobs that actually mean something, but you might want to leave this off your resumes. Definitely don't mention your blogoganda articles for this site.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<There are always randomly named folders full of copies of websites and images, as well as large downloads, audio and videos. There are also index.dat files that cannot be deleted. Will these be cleared by the new tool?>>

They've already said yes, read the comments.

As to the question about why they don't do a secure DoD wipe: What exactly are you doing with your computer? Your IT department can already see your traffic, and if the NSA wants your machine, they're going to get it another way. And mentioned above, you can DoD wipe freespace using a single command (cipher.exe).
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
>"This will be good experience for you guys (who apparently go straight from college to PM) for when you go on to jobs that actually mean something, but you might want to leave this off your resumes. Definitely don't mention your blogoganda articles for this site."

Get a life.

One of the two of the Firefox architects designed that browser while he was still in college, so why make such inane comments.

PM is a role at Microsoft, and doesn't mean you're manager of people or anything. See their Jobs page.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
> No offense to you Uche, but why is the team sending the noob to blog.

Why not? Do you think it takes a seasoned vet to write a blog post? Or just that graduates should toil in obscurity until they "put in their time?"

Tough crowd.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
There should at least be a way to automatically clean my private data when I close the browser window
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
So, according to the recent college graduate, when a person clicks on "Delete Cookie" they are also deleting the userdata store?!

Many enterprise internal apps depend on the userdata store and the fact that it can retain much more domain data than cookies. Now, the Microsoft Client Experience people are going to make it easy for an innocent --and apparently unrelated-- user action to accomplish far more than the user suspected.

Certainly nothing in the proposed dialog above gives them any warning whatsoever. Why put this devious feature under Delete Cookies anyway? Userdata stores are most often part of form entries.

At least give the user some warning as you make it easier for them to shoot themselves in the foot and lose work.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
All good, copying the features that are standard in other browsers, but;

Where's the Adblock feature in IE7?

It's been a year or so now, that we've all surfed the Internet without ads, so I'm guessing that switching to IE, will require this feature.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"Do you think it takes a seasoned vet to write a blog post?"

I want hear straight from the horse's mouth.

"Tough crowd."

Demanding customers, demand better products.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"It's been a year or so now, that we've all surfed the Internet without ads, so I'm guessing that switching to IE, will require this feature."

Yes, and they will probably try to act like they invented it as well.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
With the addition of this feature, I'm seeing IE7 becoming a useable browser.

But Firefox is a great browser, so you've still got a lot of work to do.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<>

In case you're curious, that's why Uche wrote this blog posting-- she worked on this feature. While we could have had someone else write it, I think you'd agree that it makes sense to have the feature owner write about it.

<<Where's the Adblock feature in IE7?>>

There are assorted plugins to IE that can offer adblocking features. See http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/content.aspx?ctId=63&userText=internet+explorer&all=1 for lots of IE plugins.

A plugin set I wrote (see http://www.bayden.com/ietoys/) offers the ability to "clean up" a page for reading in one click.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Where is the inovation in IE7? It's just a Microsoft version of Firefox. Can you say RIP OFF!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I would have to agree that the GUI is rather ugly (as someone about to graduate from college myself, it seems that GUI design is an area that many schools overlook). I agree that checkboxes seem more logical, after all, isn't that how most of the 3rd party tools that have this feature do it? Why not keep with their style for consistency?

I also think the fine-tuned controls that people are requesting are a good idea. Personally, I want to keep my cookies. However, I would like to delete all the "ad tracking" cookies that tend to come from 3-4 specific companies. So it would be nice to be able to only delete the ones I want rather than an all/nothing type of deal. The same really goes for everything, I may want to delete my form information for a particular site, for example, I remember one site where IE stored my Social Security Number which I wanted to delete, but I did not want to delete my form info from every other website.

Out of curiosity, why doesn't MS post these things before hand? Hopefully you'll heed some of these suggestions, and if you do, wouldn't it have been easier to add them during the planning/design phases rather than now, when you have to go back and rewrite code?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"I think you'd agree that it makes sense to have the feature owner write about it."

Why do I suspect that she was given a set of requirements prepared by someone else, with only limited design leeway?

Why not a post with an overall status from the real project manager, whoever that is these days. The person who Mr. Balmer holds accountable.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
>As far as I can see, they have only commented on removing files left behind by applications other than IE after clicking "Delete". If you see otherwise, point it out.<

Above EricLaw[MSFT] said: "If you can find this data in any index files, we want to hear about it. We worked to specifically address that issue."

So it stands to reason that the Index files and other files will be cleared.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<Why do I suspect that she was given a set of requirements prepared by someone else, with only limited design leeway?>>

I don't know, why do you suspect that?

So called "individual contributor" PMs have remarkable freedom in our designs. Of course there are always tradeoffs and constraints, as in any product (software or not).

As for where the buck stops for all of IE, read these:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/08/13/214403.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/08/17/216075.aspx
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hmmm, Looks kind of simular to the new 'Clear Private Data' in firefox. I just wonder why MS would want to include something like this in there browser. Can MS ever be original?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"Can MS ever be original?"

Yeah, they could get something out on time.

looks at the clock
tick
tock
another firefox user signs up
tick
tock
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
This is absolutely rediculous!

IE lacks basic features for years - they finally add them and they're "copying Firefox".

I bet if they didn't add them most people here would slate IE for not having basic features.

You people are absolutely pathetic.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
To Nick Davis
Thanks for your comment. 10 out of 10. I'm still wiping the tears. Here's a though for everyone - next time you want to ahem buy a gift for a loved one and want to clear your tracks, why not try ahem firefox. I let firefox alert me when a site wants to set a cookie. It's a great feature. I can deny a cookie, allow a cookie to be set permanently or just for a session. And its real easy to delete cookies in each category one at a time or via multi select. I hope this has been implemented in IE7 or I simply won't use it. The cookie management in firefox is too important. To everyone, good luck in purchasing ahem gifts for loved ones.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"Well it's about time you finally posted something new in this blog, so thanks for that." - Ron

"You people are absolutely pathetic." - Mike

If you worked for MS on IE would you desire to post something on here? I'm not defending MS at all but if you're (you're as in to everyone this applies to) going to post a reply to the team's posts at least may a critical suggestion as others and I have in the past. I believe one can view the IE blog as an attempt by the IE team to avoid having IE7 become Netscape 5 and if you're not posting in some sort of relevant reply, about how to improve features, what specs need to become supported, or comment about how horrible the GUI is then just don't bother posting in the first place.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"Where is the inovation in IE7? It's just a Microsoft version of Firefox. Can you say RIP OFF! "

It's there if you have sense to look for it. Check out the video with Margaret Cobb (http://hive.net/Member/forums/8446/ShowPost.aspx), she points out a couple of things in IE7 that nobody else has (the one click view of all your tabs is a simple example)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I think the way Maxthon currently presents the options is a better way.

#1. You have the check boxes for cookies, temp file, etc. so you can do all our none.

#2. You also can do all of this on the close of the browser each time automatically. So for all the people who what to always cover their tracks you can do that too.

Please take more ideas from Matxthon :) Especailly highlight and drag searching.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Neal: "Hey, checkbox guys... you see the "..." following the text on each of those buttons? That means there are dialogs that appear when you click them. ... How do you propose you ask/inform the users of all the options when they check multiple items?"

There is this beautiful control in Windows called a TreeView. It lets you have items, and then subitems so something like:

[X] Delete Cookies
|-- [ ] Whatever choice #1 is
`-- [X] Whatever choice #2 is

Is that really so hard? It's a style that has been used in many programs for many years. Then you avoid having 5+ new dialogs and it's easy to delete multiple things with the click of a single button.

Btw, if MS gives us a screenshot of those additional dialogs then it would be easier for me and others to propose a nice GUI.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
YES YES YES! I've wanted this feature for a long long time. Currently I use The MS Anti Spyware tool to erase my tracks. I'm so excited to get my hands on IE 7. Its been way too long.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hi, I'm the UA/tech writer for Internet Explore UI and Help. Peter, on your comment about Web site, Web page, etc..., under the old MSTP style guide, you're right. However, we are now using a new MSXUA style that's been updated for Vista. It has a number of areas that supercede the MSTP, and you're noticing some of them. We follow the Vista style which includes:

<ul>
<li>Website (one word, only cap'd if it's the start of a sentence or in a title).</li>
<li>Webpage (same as above)</li>
<li>Web (lower case unless start of sentence)</li>
<li>Sentence capitalization on buttons and frames</li>
<li>Ellipses (...) for buttons that require interaction or further data, including confirmation messages.</li>
</ul>

In our style guides we now look to the MSXUA guide first, then the MSTP. What this means is all new text that goes into IE is the new style. If we touch a page, we're making it the new style. The changes have causes some questions from devs, PM's and testers who are familiar with the older style. I've explained this several times :).

On the button text capitalization, up until now, our style guides have been pretty rigid. However a very recent (this week) change is that we can now have the option to use title capitization on buttons where it blends better with legacy text. Since IE has a lot of legacy text, I'll be working with Uche and my editor on what changes (if any) we need to do in a later fit & finish review. Thanks for your comments.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Jay,

Thanks for the update. In any event, the capitalization of the word "Information" (top of dialog) must be wrong.

Personally, my opinion of these style guide changes is that it's going to cause a lot more inconsistency. Older third party apps which follow the old guidelines will clash with the OS dialog boxes. And not to mention all the old dialog boxes in the OS that probably won't be touched.

And personally, I think that the buttons look worse without Title Case. That "Delete all" button looks pretty weak.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I like the feature - it's one of those - why wasn't it there in the first place ones ;-)

I think this is one of those areas where people who 'know' want more options, and people who 'don't' just want a way to 'secure' their machines. Is an 'advanced' option a way forward - a way of letting people choose to delete all of one option or the whole set, or those who want to can choose advanced and just clean the specific sets of things they want rid of? Or does that just complicate things further.

Forgive me if I'm repeating someone, feel free to flame!

Stewart
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<What about the history of terms entered into text fields in various websites too? I don't mean forms. E.g., if I go to msn.com and start typing in the Search the Web field>>

Stewart: Actually, what you're describing ~is~ a form. When you clear autocomplete for forms, this data will be cleared. This is possible in IE6 as well, but the button is buried in Tools | Internet Options | Content.

As for deleting on a term-by-term basis-- this is also possible in both IE6 and IE7. When you're typing and you get the little dropdown of autocomplete terms, you can use the down arrow to highlight terms in the list. When a term is highlighted, hit Delete on your keyboard and the term will be removed.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"As for deleting on a term-by-term basis-- this is also possible in both IE6 and IE7. When you're typing and you get the little dropdown of autocomplete terms, you can use the down arrow to highlight terms in the list. When a term is highlighted, hit Delete on your keyboard and the term will be removed."

I'd like to see that same feature available for the Address bar history dropdown list.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"It would be exciting if it was new and revolutionary, but it isn't."
So, Ron, why are people reacting that Microsoft is heralding this as the greatest thing ever? They aren't, and don't put words in their mouth. (You know, maybe some people ought to go and learn about this thing called "Critical Thinking")
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The Firefox 1.5 version of this is a lot more intuitive using checkboxes (mentioned by previous posters) but also has options to automatically clean up selected items on exit.

Jay Munro > "On the button text capitalization, up until now, our style guides have been pretty rigid. However a very recent (this week) change is that we can now have the option to use title capitization on buttons where it blends better with legacy text. Since IE has a lot of legacy text, I'll be working with Uche and my editor on what changes (if any) we need to do in a later fit & finish review."

However, I have to say that the change to the Windows style guide is a brain dead decision particularly as it doesn't sound like you're converting all the existing text in the OS to match the new style guidelines. So this makes applications included with the OS even less consistent with each other, certainly makes Mac OS X more appealing to those who like systems that look refined and polished. So if you change your style guide then modify all MS apps to be consistent with it, also make a lot of noise about the new style guide so that makers of other apps know about them.

In the end it'd have been much easier to keep the style guide as-is.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Anyone know of any utilities which allow you to easily do the same thing for IE6? Thanks.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I'd like to see "remove this" when right clicking on an autocomplete suggestion. Sometimes I put in the wrong url and it's extremely annoying.

I'd also like to see something that allows autocomplete to have priority. In example if I type...

.com/c

and autocomplete gives me these two options...

.com/cgi-bin/...

and...

.com/community/...

I would like to be able to drag and drop whichever autocomplete item I want to be the first (so I can type c, hit the down key, then enter) instead of having to deal with the current base method.

So dragging and dropping an autocomplete item or at least perhaps right clicking it would bring it to the top and autoselect it for me. As far as I know no browser has this (yet).

It gets old reading flames from both sides...
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Matt, MS are the ones implying we should be excited about this new feature of IE.

I still say the term "Delete Browsing History" could be confusing, and the placement of the "Delete All" button is questionable.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Wow, you guys seem to be taking a little more flack in this blog than normal, though I'm sure much of it is coming from the extended amount of time it took to get this post up - must have left people without a place to rant for a while. So lesson here is, please don't leave it so long between posts, lol.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"So lesson here is, please don't leave it so long between posts, lol."

That's all fine and dandy, but the reality of the situation is much more severe.

Meanwhile, 504,000 more people downloaded Firefox, since this same time, yesterday.

Tomorrow another 500,000 and the next day another 500,000, and the next.

Yes, please do keep us updated. :)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Seeing any improvement in IE is nice, but what about important things like CSS improvement or full XHTML support ?

Meanwhile, Firefox, Opera, Safari ... are just kicking IE on this ground ! Lots of web site are letting IE users not in a confortable situation as those sites are best viewed on alternative browser than MS one !!! This remember me the story about a browser who used to be a leader but has failed to evolved ... something like Net ... NetKindom ;-)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
When is this wretched browser going
to be released anyway?...
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"When is this wretched browser going
to be released anyway?..."

Who knows, that's the whole point. They would rather lose out on entire demographs of people ever single day, then fill people in on what's going on.

These numbers are nothing to sneeze at. It's like losing Denver yesterday, Seattle Today, Washington DC the next, so on and so one.

But let's sit here and chat about this feature that we should have implemented, in a browser we should have created, three years ago.

Microsoft is single handedly tightening their own diamond noose. Google with the release of their "pack" is kicking the living S#@# out of them, and microsoft is taking it like CHUMPS!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Excellent feature! I have done the same thing with 3rd party software with my current IE. But you could make it a bit easer if you combined some of the aspects. Like don't you think that passwords & form data could be deleted with a single click?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I thought you could clear your tracks in IE6 under Tools > Internet Options. Not exactly new stuff that inspires me to upgrade!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
EricLaw [MSFT] wrote:
"So called "individual contributor" PMs have remarkable freedom in our designs."

Give the doublespeak a rest. Can you guys just answer the questions that your customers are asking?

1) How do we provide beta feedback?
2) Did you hear us about the Menu bar placement?
3) What standards are in, and which are out?
4) Has the Beta been pushed to Q2?
5) Is IE7 to be released before Vista or not?
...

P.S. I wonder if there is something about Beta 2 that you guys not saying. Remember Beta 1?
"Oh, by the way , this one is only for MSDN subscribers"

So come March-June...

"Oh, by the way, this beta requires..."
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"Who knows, that's the whole point. They would rather lose out on entire demographs of people ever single day, then fill people in on what's going on."

I can see it now. MS says "IE7 will be released April 2, 2006." Then there is a major bug discovered. MS how has two options, either A release it with the bug (which will lead to "MS always makes buggy software!") or delay the release (which will lead to "MS can't even follow the release dates they set!"). So what's the point? As a software developer myself I NEVER set a permanent release date. Things change. I might hope to have something done by the end of the month, but then it turns out to be more work than I anticipated and therefore takes longer. Thats a very real situation. Why confine yourself to some artificially imposed deadline when all it can possibly do is hurt the product?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"I can see it now. MS says "IE7 will be released April 2, 2006." Then there is a major bug discovered."

Hey, guess what. This thing has been tested, and tested, and tested, every single day not only by the MS team, but by thousands of genuises like yourself day in and day out for over a year, has been in development for how long? It has been shown to the media and displayed in public at CES. There are no major bugs. The only major bug is Microsoft itself. How about you let them answer this one, finally.

Meanwhile they lost another major us city today in terms of download numbers to Firefox. Their stock remains flat, same as it has for the last five years. They need to answer some of these questions.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Please allow individual entry deletion out of the address-bar dropdown using SHIFT+DEL like Firefox does.
That way when someone types the wrong address, it can be easily removed from the dropdown without having to clear everything.

ps. I also agree that you should have a 'Privacy Mode' or the ability to allow trusted sites data to be excluded from a 'complete whipe'
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Channnel Nine Signup Is Down

Just thought I'd let you know here, since posting here actually works.

Just tried to sign up, to raise my beefs with those that might (a) listen, and (b) [holding my breath] might take action.

Site returns all requests with "Not accepting signups, or server error"

I'm guessing ASP doesn't handle scalability as well as PHP, or Java, or... oh dood, this is too easy!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
And real quick because this is starting to get kinda annoying...

For Steve G. and anyone else, AdBlock is NOT, I repeat NOT, part of Firefox. NO browser company offically supports the blocking of ads that I know of. While it's true Firefox has a built in plugin system that can be -used- to block ads, it certainly isn't anything that IE couldn't produce as a plugin either if someone were so inclined to do so for free. So, for the love of somebody named Pete, quit throwin' AdBlock out there as a part of Firefox until it's either offically adopted by or added into the browser itself.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@Andrew

Everyone knows Adblock isn't part of Firefox. But that is EXACTLY why Firefox Rocks. The Users decide what is wanted, needed, and they go ahead and grab it.

Does Mozilla actively push the extension? no way. But go to the main download page, and Presto! there it is, in the Top 5.

The difference is, that users want to download Firefox extensions. Every time a user gets confronted with the choice in IE? Its a different story... hmm is this one of those ActiveX things? yikes, no thanks, move along.

ActiveX has been so tightly associated with viruses, malware, spyware, adware, and performance issues, that no one wants to touch it.

I look forward to the option in IE7, of turning it off completely.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"a task I don't have the interest to undertake."

If that's not flame bait, I don't know what is. Seriously, think about what you just said... I'm not targeting you specifically, but I'd say you just summed up the difference between community driven development and MS development (I'm not saying an ad blocker should be standard, btw).

MS asks for a lot of feedback and suggestions, but they always seem to fall back on inside research and opinions. They've said the most requested fixes for IE will be addressed for IE7, but those requests were all standard 4-5 years ago anyway (PNG and CSS for eg).

I would at least like to hear the IE Team respond to particular suggestions and explain why or why not they will incorporate those suggestions.

Example:

User says: "Why does the 'Clear All' button have to be beside the 'Close' button?"

MS Replies: "We thought about the placement of this button however we could not find another way to incorporate it in this design. Do you have any suggestions?"

User replies: "Well I don't really know, is there a prompt when a user clicks on the 'Clear All' button? Maybe that would avoid people from making mistakes."

Get what I'm saying?

People become anxious when they're ignored, hence why everyone seems a little agitated on this blog.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Just rip what Firefox got, their stuff is good. Your proposed implementation have some drawbacks (mentioned above).

(one thing that strucks me, why doesn't IE just fork FF into a browser of their own.. (or give up IE and preinstall FF) that way they wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel 1000 times..)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
:-)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I've watched and read this blog for months now, and I have to jump in now.

EricLaw stated "Disable ActiveX for the Internet zone. Done." in reply to the ability to entirely disable ActiveX.

I beg to disagree, there are many cases out there where this was cracked. Setting a flag, don't not turn it off. The internal code needs [as was apparently added in 7], an exchange broker to physically cut the communications. Additionaly, you need to go into 4 separate zones to turn this off (we've all see the escalation bugs) and then you are stuck with all the other apps that embed it. (many of them run under higher rights access).
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Hey, checkbox guys... you see the "..." following the text on each of those buttons? That means there are dialogs that appear when you click them. Dialogs with multiple items on them. These aren't simply "click me and I'll delete all these" things else they'd not have the ellipsis.

How do you propose you ask/inform the users of all the options when they check multiple items?

At the moment, the "Delete All" button doesn't have the ellipsis after it, which implies that it can delete multiple items without asking the user for extra information. Presumably if it can do that for all 5 options, it could do it just as well for 3 out of the 5. Alternately, it may be that the buttons aren't following the normal convention (i.e. "Delete All" should have an ellipsis or the others shouldn't), but without actually running the app it's hard to be specific.

As for the general Firefox vs IE debate, could you all please give it a rest? Personally I think that both browsers have their pros and cons (e.g. IE is better at SVG and Firefox is better at MathML), but I don't think that repeating the same thing over and over again is going to make anybody else change their mind.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I think that this is the last time I look at this Blogg. Microsoft might enjoy wasting their time. They are no longer going to have the privelidge of wasting mine. If IE 7.0 hasn't hit the street by the end of first quarter 2006, I for one won't even bother to download it, as it will be obscelete even before it is released.

I thought Microsoft was Software Publisher. They seem to migrated into Futurology. If you want some weird insight into how the future might in 2010, just have a look at XP and IE 6.0, because from where I am standing that is right where we will still be!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The impossible delays surrounding
the release of this browser is yet
another sign that MS have 'missed
the boat'... Even when developers
are asking them Q's on their own
forum they couldn't be bothered to
answer!...

When Google finally take over the
internet I hope that they will provide
an option to turn MS off - completely.

'a great change is at hand' MS, and
it will effect you more than most...
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
To funny. Even Microsoft can't contain it now.

http://addict3d.org/index.php?page=viewarticle&type=news&ID=16479&title=New%20IE7%20Beta%202%20Screens%20Leak
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<
When Google finally take over the
internet I hope that they will provide
an option to turn MS off - completely.
>>

It's going to be a sad day when folks realize that Google is actually just as evil as any other big company. Success breeds contempt.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Looks good. I agree with the top comments about making it checkboxes instead of buttons - and remembering their settings (like Opera does).

Safari also has a nice feature called Private Browsing which means the browser doesn't keep any cookies, history or anything while private browsing is enabled.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Ruben, that's cool, sorry for jumping to conclusions with my post, then.
I also once again have to agree with you: the more rubbish that gets put up here, the less likely it is that the IE team will listen (and yes, before some wise *** comes out with something along the lines of 'well they don't listen anyways', I'd to point out that the very existence of these blogs is strong evidence that they are at least prepared to. At least when it comes to constructive, well thought out feedback, anyways).
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"It's going to be a sad day when folks realize that Google is actually just as evil as any other big company. Success breeds contempt."

Again missing the point entirely. There are two types of companies. Ones that act and ones that react. I don't know when the exact point that was for Microsoft's change but they are definatly the later.

"we should be concentrating on giving the team concise, constructive, and supportive information from the view of the general user"

http://www.jcxp.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=4400&st=0&gopid=44787&#

And what is the general view of this group? GET OUT THE BROWSER! Or someone will do it for you. With all this interest, how long do you think it will be for an unauthorized version of it to pop out for downloading?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I'm going to ask some of you to improve the tone of your posts. Insults directed at an individual will get your post deleted. Saying "no offense" doesn't immunize your post from that fate.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"It's going to be a sad day when folks
realize that Google is actually just as
evil as any other big company. Success
breeds contempt."

Interesting point, but I do not think
anyone here is implying that MS are
'evil', just imcompetent and (seemingly)
unaware/unable.

I am sure that one day the fate that is
surely awaiting MS, will also happen to
Google, but MS ARE hailing their new
browser as some glorious innovation
which it clearly is not, and I think it
is in times like this that we can finally
stop and say "MS, you've reached the end
of the road, pack up and go home. The last
card you have to play is in the desktop
market and, 'though it's a big play, I
do not think it will be too long before
you have some real competition in this
area".

And patronising comments, from their staff,
such as "I’ll let you meditate on the
information and allow the excitement to
naturally evolve" illustrate the sad attempt
at hype, that should not be there, and the
substance that is very clearly not there.

Microsoft RIP..
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I'm going to ask some of you to improve the tone of your posts. Insults directed at an individual will get your post deleted. Saying "no offense" doesn't immunize your post from that fate.

I will state again. I am not pro-Firefox. In fact I am the quite opposite. I am a Microsoft consumer, stockholder, and a website owner.

I am passionate about these issues because I have a lot riding in Microsoft. I don't think anyone here has a direct hatered for MS or that anyone is "out" for another person on this board. But when people are passionate about issues strong discussion is bound to happen. Especially when the company in question releases nothing and discusses nothing in terms of information or answers to direct questions or statements it's very lifeline exsists upon.

Answers are needed Microsoft, and not just to me, or not just to anyone on this board, not just to the press, or to developers, but to the individuals that do care, that do buy your products and surf your sites and they are getting nothing from you. So instead they are bypassing you at an alarming rate.

They didn't get that xbox they wanted, they bought from google this christmas whose share of the online retailing market inceased phenominally, also 73% of online holiday travelers searched from google. They aren't getting the security they want from the browser they did trust and there are no other options so they are switching to Firefox. They don't want to hear anymore about patches of your product that someone else get's out before you.

They are not just sitting idly by waiting for you to develop this browser. They are by-passing you all together. And that concerns me not just as a consumer, not just as a stockholder, but as a website owner that has staked my trust in this browser that is giving nothing to me either.

I am done posting here. I will no longer check here as it is obvious that you don't want to answer our serious concerns that are happening as we speak. And I am a die-hard fan of MS I am just tired that MS is not a die-hard fan of me.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I find the anti-Microsoft rhetoric here almost unbearable. If Firefox fanboys want to extoll the virtues of Firefox, that's great, but there are Firefox user groups where you can go and lambast Internet Explorer till the cows come home. In being childish and insulting you are only serving to promote the image that you are either children let loose at the desk unsupervised, or frankly ignorant.

This Microsoft employee took time out from her work schedule to post a status update on a commonly requested feature that has been added to Internet Explorer. Saying that it's been ripped off from FireFox is nonsense, the options have been present in Internet Explorer for a long time, all that's happened here is that they've been collated from the various tabs of the options menu and put into a single place (As well as a bit of a tune-up, such as index wiping).

That said, I find it hard to believe that Firefox users would stand back and scream copycat, when their product of choice simply follows in the footsteps of others, uses the tabbed application paradigm that first arrived with the windows start menu, renders HTML like browsers were doing in the decade or so before it, and so on and so forth.

Like it or not, theres a team developing IE again now, and IE 7 will do a lot to close the gap between itself and FireFox. Indeed, most of the FireFox selling points will evaporate in the next release, and considering other browsers have had four year period in which to charge ahead, that so little has been done is amazing, when so much has been made of it.

Criticising IE is all well and good, but having a whine about it when MS wake up and do something about it is laughable.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I am the dev manager for the team implementing these changes to the Internet Options dialog (aka InetCPL). I wanted to give some background on why we implemented the Delete Browsing History dialog this way.

IE6 has a bunch of buttons sprinkled all over InetCPL to clear various types of data; the primary purpose of the new IE7 dialog is to consolidate all those buttons into one place and provide a "Delete All" button. The main user benefit is obvious: no need to poke around InetCPL tyring to find where we hid the button to clear password data, say.

I get that a lot of the comments here are asking for the checkbox based design. We actually had a quite a series of debates about checkboxes vs. buttons during the spec process of this feature. I agree that using checkboxes, remembering the various settings, adding "and do this whenever I exit the browser" checkbox, and so on would make this a more flexible and more powerful feature. But it would also introduce a new set of interface complexities for our users, and cost significantly more for us to implement.

We came to the conclusion that the button consolidation approach gave us the most straightforward feature. A user can use one button to clear everything, or he/she can use individual buttons to clear individual data items (plus confirmation dialogs, of course). The implementation cost of this design was also reasonable for the user benefit gained. This is in keeping with our overall goal for the Internet Options dialog in IE7, which is simplification and clarification without radical change.

I also wanted to add that I think it's great Uche is so enthusiastic about delivering her first feature at Microsoft. You may agree or disagree that the scope of this feature deserves some of the more grandiose phrasing she used, and that's OK.

I welcome more feedback on how this feature works when the public preview comes out, which should be sometime in Q1 2006 (see our post on that at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/06/500599.aspx).
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
That's what I was talking about Bruce! Spot on.

I can see what you mean that checkboxes would't fit in with the rest of the IE design, as far as consistency goes it makes sense to use the multiple buttons approach (considering there's no checkboxes in IE at the moment).

Will there be an alert/prompt when one clicks on "Delete All" for the sake of safety?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Well I use freeware CCleaner to delete all by 1 click, I can exclude cookies in there. Will it be possible to exclude cookies or passwords?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
>> But it would also introduce a new set of interface complexities for our users, and cost significantly more for us to implement.

Can't you make it possible for power users to enable a set of power options ? In this way you would make the so-wanted options available, without making the basic interface too complex.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Bruce Morgan [MSFT] wrote:
"... when the public preview comes out, which should be sometime in Q1 2006 (see our post on that at ..."

We saw that post. Then we saw press reports saying Q2. Then you state it "should" be Q1.

Excuse me if I invoke the "I'm from Missouri" clause.

Show me!
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Ron, yes there is a warning for "Delete All". BTW, the dialog shown has a few style guide problems and isn't final. The ellipses are wrong on some of the buttons, some button sizing isn't correct, and the text could use some improvement IMHO. But it's functionally complete.

TheTom, there won't be a bunch of individual deletion management features. That's beyond the scope we wanted for this feature, as is Joost's request for a "basic" and an "advanced" interface. Again, the primary benefit of this IE7 feature is to consolidate the existing deletion functionality into one dialog.

Mule, please forgive my choice of the word "should" - we will have a public IE7 preview in the first quarter. I understand that my saying that doesn't mean much. You'll just have to wait and see.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Adding this feature to IE is a good choice. Yes, it is similar to Firefox's implementation but the options have always been there in IE and this is just consolidating them into one area. (I don't remember the post exclaiming that this is a revolutionary feature) Companies always copy ideas from each other; Firefox is no different than Microsoft in this.

Many people also seem to be asking Microsoft to release IE7 now lest they lose marketshare. I can just imagine if they did! Those same people would be back on here to complain that Microsoft rushed their product out and how incomplete it is!

As additional -

1) It would be nice to see the interface behind each one of the clearing options. Any chance of some further pictures?

2)The idea of an option to not cachestore historyetc for a specified period is interesting if it could be implemented.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Wow it's great the IE cache will now be cleared in the background. Waiting for that could always be a pain.

It's interesting to note that AOL Explorer has had this feature since the summer...it's called "Clear My Footprints". It uses checkboxes to mark specific history items and then there is one click access to clear the selected items at any time. Take a look. :)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
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Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Kyle, by cost I mean development time. Note that I never said it would be "too difficult".

The Firefox style checkbox approach is only slightly more expensive than the button approach. The difference is mostly because we would have to rip out the existingconfirm dialogs. Remember, this is based on IE6 code not start-from-scratch code. Had we only wanted that level of functionality, well, then the difference in dev cost is not significant.

It's doing more than that is when it starts to become more time consuming than we wanted to invest. Note that I'm talking about comparing implementation A to implementation B, not in an absolute sense. None of this is rocket science.

BTW, another factor that led us to buttons is that buttons allow us to add richer functionality in future versions without changing the base functionality of the dialog. For example, in IE7 the "Delete Cookies" button results in a mere confirmation dialog, but in some future version it could put up a richer cookie deletion dialog.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@Bruce,

OMG, I just clued into what's going on here.

This isn't really a new feature, you've (MS) just gone in, refactored a bit of code, without changing the called functions, and "moved" the buttons in the GUI. I was, as I think many were, expecting a significant revamp of the entire logic.

- -

As for the "future options", the checkbox approach still enables this.

[Do it] button, calls: [doRequestedTasks()]

Which does a quick check of the form's checkbox controls, to see what actions need to run...

Then, (as applicable), deleteCookies(), deleteCache(), deleteFormData(), delete...() are called...

For any of the above, each function/method can invoke a dialog/confirmation (whatever you desire), and each func/method, can be modified any way you want in the future.

I'm getting the sneaky suspicion, that the various actions taking place here, are "tied" to the buttons onClick(), versus being functions, called by the onClick()...

Sounds like it's time for some abstract-ification.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
will IE 7 delete Index.dat files as currently found in Internet Explorer 6?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Sometimes it's valuable and/or necessary to make significant architectural changes to support new features, but in this case it wasn't necessary nor would it add much value.

The only significant internal change was to run the "clear history" functionality on a background thread with a progress indicator in a dialog.

The UI is a combination of new code, refactored code, and existing unmodified code. The underlying existing abstraction layer to delete various types of data is essentially unchanged.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
If "checkbox-based" or "tree-based" deletion options are in such demand, as some posters would have you believe, then someone will go off and write an IE extension that does this. It would be quite straightforward for someone to do.

I agree with Bruce that Microsoft shouldn't be spending its time on this advanced of a feature. If an advanced feature is in such demand, then someone will write it.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Steve Gray - I completely agree with you - FF related stuff should go on FF forums and IE stuff on IE forums/blogs (i.e. here!)

Bruce Morgan - It's great to see a post that clears up a lot of stuff that people here have been debating about - maybe posting it a little earlier may have stopped a few heated exchanges, but better late than never...

How about we congratulate Uche on her first blog post for MS like Bruce suggested? I hope everybody will agree that she's done an excellent job. Coming back to your entry full up with some of the comments seen here recently must be disconcerting for any blogger, no? :)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<will IE 7 delete Index.dat files as currently found in Internet Explorer 6?>>

The Index.dat file will not be deleted but history information in it will be zero'd out. If you can find data in the file after you run Delete Browsing History, we'd consider this a bug; please let us know.

We explicitly updated this feature to make sure that the Index.dat data is cleared (unlike in IE6).
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
My problem with deleting cookies is that I have a site that required a cookie to remember my account and my computer, otherwise I have to re register again.... so will have to clicks to clean as I do now
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
To: Eric Law (or any other Microsoft employee who may be bale to help)

<<The Index.dat file will not be deleted but history information in it will be zero'd out>>.

This is interesting. What will happen to index.dat's as they "expire"? For example, at present IE will store data for 20 days by default. Will daily & weekly index.dat files falling otuside of the 20 days also be zero'd?

Will other information deleted using the "Delete browsing history" also be zero'd, such as cached images, cookies, etc?

Thank you for any more information that you may be able to provide.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
"visted"

It seems like Microsoft is really getting into the "Vista spirit". :-)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
<<Will other information deleted using the "Delete browsing history" also be zero'd, such as cached images, cookies, etc? >>

If you click "Delete browsing history" and are able to find any trace of your traffic visible via normal means, we consider that a bug and want to hear about it. As noted before, we do not perform a disk wipe and if you want to prevent undeletions, you can use Cipher /w:C:

<<In the fine print, on the RSS Feed dialog, it states that my computer (Windows), will be checking (wGet?) my feeds for me to check for updates!?!?!? even when IE isn't running? >>

You raise some good points, but I assure you that we've considered all of these factors and there's no cause for alarm.

Subscribing to a feed means just that-- you ~want~ content to be sent to your computer. If you don't want content to be sent to your computer, then don't subscribe to the feed.

Also, please note: CSS styles are not processed during the subscription process, only when you view a document. The Local Computer zone in Windows does not have permission to run ActiveX controls, so there's no worry there.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
This will make things a lot easier. My only question regarding to the background deletion thread is if a new IE window is open and the deletion process has not been completed whether or not the problem is resolved? I've had the cache take up to 20 min to delete in the past. I'm assuming that if I continue to surf within that 20 min, that the cache may still be in effect? Will there be a pop up stating that the deletion has been completed, much like Windows Update?

Also, I don't know if it's possible due to the core integration, but will we ever see a "Repair Internet Explorer", as seen in Accessories - System Tools of older Windows, for XP and Vista? Or does it already exist in a different location?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Thanks to Eric for this clear answer to my post:
Saturday, January 14, 2006 9:57 PM by EricLaw [MSFT]

Clearly room for more usability improvements there, but thanks for clearing up this mystery.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I completely agree with Nick Davis.... it looks VERY suspicious if you suddenly have a completely blank internet history, temporary internet files, etc. Much better would be to be able to disable the storing of the data temporarily, and then I can turn it back on once I've bought Rachel those flowers :)
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@TonyH: We've actually improved the speed of the cache clearing code, and the default size of the cache is smaller than before (which actually results in better overall performance for most people). I haven't seen cache clearing take more than about 30 seconds lately. We show a progress meter while deletion is in progress, and it goes away when it's done.

There will be a "Reset All Defaults" button in IE7-- stay tuned for more info.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Oh, one other thing that anoys users to no end, is that the multi-dialog confirmations for deleting history (cookies, cache, history, etc.) is the placement of the dialogs.

If you INSIST on using a confirm dialog for each (read: Don't, it !@#$ing anoying), then at least place them all in the same general location. Why must the "history" dialog be centered on the DESKTOP, when the others are not?

Please tell me that this has been fixed.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@Klever-- Confirmation dialogs appear to be positioned consistently. You only get one confirmation if you choose to Delete All.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Yes, like everyone else, I want to see a way of protecting cookies from some sites so that I can delete the rest with a single click. I think this is a must have. (and it should protect favicons too)

I'd also love to be able to see which site was responsible for the cookie turning up. I don't always care who the 3rd party ad-site is as long as it came via a reputable source.

Will we have wildcards and an import list function for the cookie blocker? I'd like that.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@TonyH: "However, you didn't answer my question regarding an IE Repair/Reinstall."

Sure he did: 'There will be a "Reset All Defaults" button in IE7-- stay tuned for more info.'
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
@Mark: I'm being optimistic of what "Reset All Defaults" means. My first impression of this was the equivalent of Safari's "Reset Safari" http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Safari/2.0/en/ibr55.html. However most of those features would be covered in the "Delete All" button of IE7. Therefore doesn't fulfill my interpretation of a Repair/Reinstall.

Q318378 includes the reinstallation of software. I certainly hope that "Reset All Defaults" will do the same, even if it requires the OS cd to do so. It has been my experience that drivers, dlls and related files can be corrupted by malware, viruses, hd sector corruption, ect that may not fix the problem from a reinstall from the hard drive. A clean install from the OS cd may be tedious, but should guarantee better results.

I'll wait patiently until Eric will reveal "more info." I just want the IE Team to take Q318378 into consideration when implementing this potentially powerful feature.

On a side note will "Delete Browsing History" and "Reset All Defaults" be back ported to IE6 SP2(+)?
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
I'm sure someone probably already brought this up, but while we're discussing potential UI improvements in IE7...

Would it be possible to finally add CSS style switching to IE? I believe it's the only remaining major browser that doesn't natively support switching author stylesheets.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Using swear words in your comments will cause them to be deleted.

- Al Billings [MSFT]
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
This would be a very useful feature for those who use those public access computers. One click and your history is wiped.
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
PingBack from http://dancmorgan.wordpress.com/2006/01/31/ie7-clear-my-tracks/
Anonymous
January 31, 2006
Will there also be a button, clear my ISP logs?
Anonymous
February 01, 2006
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
February 01, 2006
I hope you added the appropriate boxes to Disk Cleanup so one can use the /sageset and /sagerun options of cleanmgr to schedule deletions.
Anonymous
February 24, 2006
The comment has been removed
Anonymous
April 22, 2006
Co to jest "Delete Browsing History"? Najprościej rzecz ujmując jest to funkcja umożliwiająca w bardzo...
Anonymous
June 12, 2006
Hello, we are Durga and Bala, from the IE IDC team. We would like to describe to you, a new feature in...
Anonymous
August 03, 2006
Continuing the discussion in the previous post, offcourse index.dat is not a secret record of any kind,...
Anonymous
August 04, 2006
Since a recent digg article and its underlying Wikipedia entry seems a little confused about index.dat,...
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://www.mondoblog.it/archives/292
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PingBack from http://fernandodailynews.hostevo.com/findbrowsinghistorywithfirefox.html
Anonymous
June 05, 2008
First let me introduce myself. My name is Uche Enuha and I am a recent college graduate hire to the Internet Explorer team. I am a Program Manager working on the User Experience team. Now to the main point. There is a new feature in IE7 called ‘Delet
Anonymous
June 24, 2008
This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The topic is complicated
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://blog.itsolutionsla.com/index.php/2008/06/24/ie8-and-trustworthy-browsing/
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://angelnews.977mb.com/browsinghistorynotworking.html
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://namatamago.com/site/dive/?p=165
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1538
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/25/ie8-and-privacy.aspx
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/nzie8/archive/2008/08/26/ie8-and-privacy.aspx
Anonymous
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The comment has been removed
Anonymous
October 06, 2008
PingBack from http://www.pprune.org/computer-internet-issues-troubleshooting/345991-vista-browsing-history-delete-how-much-does-delete.html#post4442817
Anonymous
February 26, 2009
이 글은 Internet Explorer 개발 팀 블로그 (영어)의 번역 문서입니다. 이 글에 포함된 정보는 Internet Explorer 개발 팀 블로그 (영어)가 생성된 시점의
Anonymous
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PingBack from http://vistahome.org/2009/03/23/ie8-and-privacy-vista-home/
Anonymous
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