The IE8 Favorites Bar
Hi, my name is Helen, I am a Program Manager on the User Experience team of Internet Explorer, and I’m happy to introduce the IE8 Favorites bar!
New Functionality on the Favorites bar:
The Favorites bar, previously known as the Links toolbar, has been updated with great new functionality that helps you get information from your favorite websites quickly and easily. The new IE8 Favorites bar still has your favorite links just one click away, but also allows you to add WebSlices (new feature debuting in IE8) and feeds to the Favorites bar, facilitating your navigation experience. The WebSlices and feeds on the Favorites bar will check for updates to content on your favorite websites without requiring navigation to those websites.
Here’s my Favorites bar which includes a feed, a folder containing a feed, and a WebSlice:
What is a WebSlice?
As Jane described earlier in her blog post , the new IE8 WebSlice feature enables you to see when updated content (such as auction prices or latest headlines) is available from your favorite websites. A WebSlice is a piece of a webpage (a “slice”) that you can subscribe to. When you subscribe to a WebSlice, it appears as a shortcut on the Favorites bar.
Note that WebSlices will only appear on webpages that provide support for WebSlices. As of today, websites such as Ebay, Facebook and Stumble Upon have added support for WebSlices. Check out this page to learn how you can add support for WebSlices on your webpages.
Using WebSlices
There are two ways to see when a WebSlice is available on a webpage. One is that the WebSlice button changes color on the Command bar:
When you hover over a WebSlice on a webpage, you will also see a WebSlice icon appear next to the content that you can add to your Favorites bar. For example:
To add a WebSlice to the Favorites bar, you can either click the WebSlice button on the Command bar or click the WebSlice icon on the page.
In IE8, a simple glance at the text on a Favorites bar shortcut will give an indication of the item’s status. You will be able to tell whether or not the WebSlice has been updated since you last used it (the text will be bolded) and also if the WebSlice is expiring (the text will be bold and italicized) or has expired (the text will be gray). This information is especially worthwhile, for example, with auction items.
The IE8 Favorites bar allows you to preview the updated WebSlice content without leaving the website you’re currently viewing. Simply click the WebSlice shortcut on the Favorites bar to bring up a rich preview of the webpage, which you can then click to go to the website itself.
WebSlice Preview:
Adding Feeds to the Favorites bar
In IE8, you can now add Feeds to the Favorites bar. When you subscribe to a feed, you can watch for updates to it on the Favorites bar.
As you know, to subscribe to a feed and monitor it on the Favorites bar, you first click the Feed Discovery button to view the feed, and then click Subscribe to this Feed on the feed page. To then monitor this feed on the Favorites bar, click the Add to Favorites button
, and then click Monitor on Favorites Bar. You can also drag and drop a feed or an entire folder of feeds from the Favorites Center to the Favorites bar.
By clicking on a Feed shortcut on your Favorites bar, you can quickly identify which feed items you have already read (they will be in plain text) and which you have yet to read (they will be bolded).
Extra Tips and Shortcuts:
In addition to adding a link through the "Add to Favorites" button, you can drag and drop links onto the Favorites bar, drag the webpage icon from the Address bar to the Favorites bar or drag a link from a webpage directly to the Favorites bar.
You can rearrange items on your Favorites bar by dragging items from one spot to another or by creating folders and organizing your favorite links, WebSlices, and feeds by dragging and dropping items into the folders.
When an item within a folder updates, you will see the updated status on the folder itself. If a folder is unbolded, you will know that nothing has updated within that folder without even opening it.
Navigating with the Favorites bar is convenient as well. To put focus on the first item on the Favorites bar, press ALT+B.
Like regular links, the Favorites bar supports tab and window shortcuts. For example, you can Ctrl+Click or Middle-click on an item (or a folder) on the Favorites bar and this item (or the contents of this folder) will open in a new tab (or tabs) in the background.
Similarly, Ctrl+Shift+Click on an item on the Favorites bar will open up this item in a tab in the foreground.
That’s a summary of the new ways that the IE8 Favorites bar will help you get information from your favorite webpages quickly and easily.
Thank you for trying IE8 Beta 1 and I look forward to your feedback on this feature!
Helen Drislane
Program Manager
Comments
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.comAnonymous
March 12, 2008
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March 12, 2008
feeds don't seem to work. I dropped a feed (xml) onto the favorite's bar, and it did NOT make a dropdown "menu" of the feed. It just made a link, which when clicked would just navigate to the RSS view of the feed.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Helen, I just have to ask and possibly beg. Do NOT remove the favorites or links toolbar. I would love though, for it to be on its own bar all by itself without the favorites icons towards the far right. Or, if you could make it so that I could easily remove the favorites icons and just have ALL of the favorites bar to myself. Thanks Helen!Anonymous
March 12, 2008
These are very cool and I'll probably put my feeds on the favorite bar - but please, be so wise that you re-include the amount of customizability that IE6 had in the command/favorite/url bar. Right now the command bar is rigid and offers very limited customization, and so I can't set it to look in a way that I find comfortable, or more effective for my browsing needs. For example, I'd want to set the command bar (the one with the homepage/feeds/properties/emulate ie7 buttons) up next to the favorites bar, but I can't do this, because its hardcoded to stay next to the tabs. Also, a minor bug which is probably related: If I idle IE8b1 for a while, when I return to the window, the favorites icons (both the one that toggles the favorite window and the add favorites... button) displays text next to its icons.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
That was very positive Kozogle now tell us what you really think.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
I had to run IE8 in Administration mode in order to get WebSlices to work. I would get an error. Then Ran As Admin... and was able to add tehm.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
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March 12, 2008
Kozogle: I've heard UI customization interfaces may come to IE8, but please, in its early beta stages, UI is usually not the priority. So keep your pants together, just wait for the final version or at least another beta or release candidate. Not speaking for the IETeam, but yeah.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
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March 12, 2008
How about making the Windows XP build fit in with the look and feel of the Windows XP operating system? That would benefit all XP users, not just the handful of power users who know what a "feed" is. The tabbed sidebar is a nice improvement: Favourites, Feeds and History are now much easier to switch between once it is open. But the <a href="http://projectcerbera.com/ui/ie8/b1/sidebar/">sidebar still cuts through the status bar</a>, displacing it towards the right of the screen. Would be good if the tabs for browsing between pages actually looked like tabs, the way tabs look elsewhere in IE and Windows. Such as these new tabs in the sidebar. There are still big gaps around the sidebar controls. Unlike the snug-fitting sidebars for Folders and Favourites that you get in Windows Explorer on XP. A sidebar is inevitably a narrow space. Making optimal use of this space an especially important design choice. It seems geekish feature requests are being hacked together as the UI team's priority. These benefit just a handful of elite users. Plain-as-day UI bugs and poor layout choices have yet to be sorted out. As documented by myself and many others. Fixing those would benefit every IE user. Please stop repeating the mistakes of IE7 with buggy, badly laid out UI using a look and feel which does not match the OS it is running on.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Please support <a href> in comments. People must be able to provide sensible text for their links. Raw URIs are not accessible link text. Neither is garbled HTML markup. Supporting basic, harmless HTML in a blog specifically aimed at HTML authors is a no-brainer, I'd have thought.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
@SomeOne In Jane's post on WebSlices, she notes a known bug with WebSlices requiring "Run As Admin" to enable WebSlice functionality: There is a known issue with WebSlices that use cookies for authentication on Vista with Protected Mode on. If you are having issues with the Facebook WebSlice on Vista, delete the Facebook WebSlice from the Favorites bar, run IE8 in elevated mode (right-click on IE8 and select the “Run as administrator” option”) and re-subscribe to the WebSlice. Glad to hear this workaround was successful for you.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
The IE8 Favorites Bar. I was expecting a new pub of somekind ;)
- Lee
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Do web slices work with generated content ... such as AJAX?Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Cause I can't seem to get it to work with generated content. Static content works fine.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
BTW I'm using innerHTML to generate the content rather than createElement.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
- The bold text will make the interface ugly and distracting.
- Graying out the feed when there are no new posts implies that the feed is 'disabled', I imagine this will cause some people to think there's a problem. The menu items certainly don't look clickable, even though they are.
- Why not use a favicon to mark an item as being 'read' and use the RSS icon for unread items?
- Instead of "Open all items (3 new)", why not call it "Open all unread items (3 unread)"? Isn't that what it does?
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
@Rowan: On your last point, "open all items" opens the feed up in IE's feed view, which shows only the unread/new items by default, but you can easily change the filter to show all items.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Ah - nice preview. It looks really nice (okay some minor design issues), which is one important fact for me using a toolbar. Second is the funcionality. The slices function could become my favourite tool - because space on the screen(s) is/ are limited. I had also some problems with the width of the tabs and dynamic feeds (like mentioned already abouve).Anonymous
March 12, 2008
I'd like the ability to remove text from a favorite in order to simply use the site's favicon instead. I have 19 bookmarks in Firefox with only eight characters of text between three bookmarks. I know you folks save the favorites as files so perhaps you could do something such as add double dots to the beginning of the file name to hide the text. Do not confuse this with hiding the text labels on icons, removing the description of something by default is a huge no-no in regards to design. Mozilla has been making mistake after mistake in regards to design: I can bookmark every page I visit but I can no longer go! Design is as equally important as development: developer's work won't be used if the design alienates the user from using the feature.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
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March 12, 2008
The new bar uses up too much screen estate for my liking. Consequently had to turn that off, even though I liked a the previewing functionality. It would be much better if it could auto-hide. Like it comes up when I press ALT or some other key and disappears after sometime if the mouse pointer isn't on it. Or meake Alt+B work even when the favorites bar is turned off. That would neither eat screen estate, nor would let anyone miss out on its functionality.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Intersting favorites features. But I still have very very many favorites. Can I quickly search my favorites yet? Can I have more than 1 toolbar of favorites?Anonymous
March 12, 2008
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March 12, 2008
Add scrollbars to webslices. I put all my CSS and webslices into a "Feeds" folder on the favorites bar. Opening StumbleUpon's webslice only shows a cropped portion of the content, there's no way to scroll down/right.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
The new IE8 Favorites bar still has your favorite links just one click away, but also allows you to add WebSlices (new feature debuting in IE8) and feeds to the Favorites bar, facilitating your navigation experience. The WebSlices and feeds on the Favorites bar will check for updates to content on your favorite websites without requiring navigation to those websites.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
It still seems to amaze me how microsoft(with the amount of resources Microsoft has) can be so behind in everything.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
you guys should buy maxthon not yahoo! If you can't, integrate at least IEPRO into your browser! I can understand "Kozogle". You can't be productive in IE7/8 if you know Maxthon or FF + 10k Extentions :) Thanks to Maxthon, I am using tabbed browsing since IE5 or some thing like that. by the way, thank for delivering a better Engine for my Maxthon.Anonymous
March 12, 2008
I noticed the same IE7 bugs/inconveniences regarding the feed management were retained here in IE8 beta:
- When I have several feeds grouped into a folder, I often want to mark ALL of them as read. Currently, I have to go and right click on each feed individually.
- When I open the feed, I see the page with the headers and the summary text listed for all fresh news items. This is usually OK for casually updated feeds; however, for heavily updated ones that publish 20-30+ items per day (e.g. BBC news for a particular area) I often want ONLY headers because visually it's much easier for the eye to scan them and then expand the item that grabbed my attention.
- When I have the feed item selected (highlighted) and then right click the next feed item, the old one still stays highlighted and in effect showing me two lines as highlighted, which is annoying and is a bug.
Anonymous
March 12, 2008
This is just to say: "keep up the good work, guys, IE8 seems to go in the right direction". I'm sick and tired of people whining and saying that FF or Opera are better than IE. If so, good for them... but what are they doing here...?Anonymous
March 12, 2008
Really liking the way IE8 is shaping up. I agree it would be nice to be able to make favorites bar movable, auto hide-able (is that a word?), or be a bit smaller as it seems quite chunky sitting at the top there. I mus tadmit when I first isntalled IE8 my first recation was, "hmmm, the favorites bar is turned on by default and it's big. I best turn that off". This post has inspired me to give it another go and see how I get on with it. Another smalle request, would it be possible to drag a tab to the favorites bar? I know I can drag the icon from the address bar but dragging the tab seems a little bit easier and offers users another way to achieve the same thing. Keep up the great workAnonymous
March 13, 2008
Hello IE dev team, I just tried out the Firefox 4 beta and I have to say WOW!. The speed that browser opens up at and how fast it opens my iGoogle page and GMAIL is insane. You guys have to make sure IE is at least as fast or faster if you want to change IEs perception. This is coming from a life time IE fan. If IE8 isn't as fast I am going to have to switch. Don't let the IE community down.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
Microsoft talks up the new IE 8 Favorites Bar which, as it turns out, isn't so new: The FavoritesAnonymous
March 13, 2008
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March 13, 2008
I hate putting requests in for things unrelated to the topic at hand, but I'm not sure where to put this as it's more of a usability requests then a bug or a feature request. Can the final version of IE8 PLEASE support multiple monitors better? I hate the fact that any pop-up window that is opened is always opened on my first monitor, rather than the monitor that IE currently resides on. This behavior just doesn't make sense to me. Firefox does it too. Safari and Opera are the only browsers I know of that correctly position elements using the currently monitor.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
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March 13, 2008
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March 13, 2008
@Brian LePore, You are referring to this bug: Bug 139@Web Bug Track http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2008/02/bug-139-javascript-dialogs-dont-center.html The dialogs (alert, prompt, and confirm) should ALL center on the IE Window. They shouldn't center on a monitor (primary, secondary, or combined) period! Hopefully this will get fixed. We are only at Beta 1, so there is much more that needs to get fixed, and thankfully there is lots of time.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
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March 13, 2008
Please tell me users (as in the non-developer, non-power-user type) have actually requested these features, for right now all I can envision is my mother "buried in her own confusion" as she attempts to find a way to bookmark Amazon so she can buy her books.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
Hey Now, I love the links bar. I also like to rename them w/ one letter so I fit a lot up there & use folders on my links bar to make more favs available. Thx 4 the info, CattoAnonymous
March 13, 2008
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March 13, 2008
@Larry / Brian LePore, Alert and Confirm simply use the windows MessageBox function. Interestingly I don't recall ever experiencing any problems with them showing up on the wrong monitor. @Ben 'Cerbera' Millard, The reason why the favorites center (in IE7 and IE8) appears to "cut into" the status bar is because the favorites center is part of the frame, while the status bar is part of the tab. (Use Spy++ to confirm this.) I imagine at some point they will move the status bar out to the frame, but I imagine that is a fair amount of work with very little gain at this point.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
nice... It like firefox system but WebSlices is new and nice feature. Tomorrow, I use mediawiki with IE8 from Ko NyiLynnSeck laptop.Don't work this address http://localhost/mediawiki/index.php/MainPage . It work in Firefox and IE7. I think, this is apache problem. I forget to one test. I should try with index.php?title=MainPage. I think it may work.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
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March 13, 2008
I saw from Paul Thurrots Win Supersite that you toyed with the idea of using your ribon technology in IE8. Id love to see this or at least test it in a beta. I think more applications should make use of it.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
hi, actually just wanted to ask about a feature. Would IE 8 have an inbuilt spell checker??Anonymous
March 13, 2008
I like the idea of webslices, but the implementation is just plain ugly and complicated. Trying to talk the W3C into a new tag would be cleaner and promote better cross browser support. I like the favorites bar UI changes, including its availability in fullscreeen mode. Much more useful. I am disappointed however, that the weather example shown so extensively in screen shots of the feature is unavailable. FireFox has a plugin that shows the weather on the footer, and the webslice would have been a nice IE version of the same, even if I did have to hunt for it a little. Hopefully someone updates the MSN weather site soon with a slice. Reminds me, gotta go get IE8 again. Updated machine to x64 from x86 and lost it. <sigh>Anonymous
March 13, 2008
Personally I'd rather see webslices in the Sidebar, since some of us do things with our computers other than just using IE all day. Hopefully at a minimum this will be coming in Windows 7, but even still I don't see anything constricting about Sidebar that would prevent IE itself from shipping a webslice gadget for Sidebar. Of course, most of the popular things that webslices are would be used for (auctions, weather, etc) are already available as actual gadgets, greatly reducing the usefulness of webslices themselves. For those on XP or those not running Sidebar, a taskbar toolbar for displaying webslices would be great as well. Or, is it possible to display the new Favorites bar in the taskbar like you can with the IE7 Links bar?Anonymous
March 13, 2008
Please do not remove inline autocomplete, please please please. :) I'm so tired and sad to see MS removing features and users begging them not to remove features.Anonymous
March 13, 2008
WebSlice? How about support Sharepoint's WebPart?Anonymous
March 13, 2008
I think that it would be a great idea if you display the favicon of the feed items also and not only the favicon of the feed site. I have on del.icio.us a feed with all my populer sites, I've added the feed to the favorites bar and I see the del.icio.us fav on the toolbar but when I open to see the items I don't see any of the favs of the feed items.Anonymous
March 14, 2008
Even though this is Beta 1 why on earth would MS release a preview build that crashes repeatedly with 2 of the most used toolbars in the world, Google toolbar and Yahoo toolbar? This was very poor QA testing.Anonymous
March 14, 2008
thank you for live bookmarks! all i need now is drag-n-drop url support (as in highlight url on webpage in plain text and drop on the tab bar to create new tab for that url) and i'll totally stop using Fx. oh! and a decent download manage that supports resuming.Anonymous
March 14, 2008
@David: Lets be clear-- Google and Yahoo toolbars are crashing. That's usually because they are calling undocumented functions that changed, or making other assumptions that are incorrect. So it's not a case of poor QA, but rather poor development practices from 3rd parties.Anonymous
March 14, 2008
While all these posts focus on the Favorites Bar, I'd like to know from someone actually using the beta if I'll be able to drag a tab to another part of my monitor and have the site open up in its own window. These are the types of navigation features and enhancements I'm looking for, and I hope the the IE team get it right with the next release. If they don't, I'll most likely be switching to Firefox for good. While the post by Kozogle might not be considered particularly constructive, this individual is certainly correct in pointing to the user experience as a whole, and the vast array of user enhancements and features available to Firefox users. The only thing I found remotely useful for IE7, for example, was the add-in called "IE7 Pro", which unfortunately caused certain features on some websites to fail. I hope that IE8 will allow developers to create plug-ins very similar to the ones for Firefox. I think this is what Microsoft should be focusing their attention on. Otherwise, I don't really see much hope of IE8 becoming the browser of choice for power-users.Anonymous
March 14, 2008
Favorites are almost impossible to manage in ie7 once you've got more than a few hundred- which lots of people do have from bookmarking things. Its no fun scrolling down the favorites list when it scrolls off the bottom of the screen. Lift and drag into folders is too cumbersome. I dont see anything here that will help me manage my favorites. FF3 seems to have some smart ideas about using tags to help group favorites which Ie8 should take a look at.Anonymous
March 15, 2008
It's easier to organize your favorites in windows explorer. It's in your user folder. Remember, it's integrated into windows :D It's beta 1, if it passes QA, it wouldn't be in beta :P Let's wait for beta2 and see if the bugs get fixed. The problem is many sites used codes to check for IE and write quirky stuff. IE8's standard mode will break.Anonymous
March 15, 2008
Very cool, - here are my comments about grouping the feeds on the favorites bar.
- It who’d be nice if I didn’t have to click to get to the next feed. Meaning that once you open one feed you can just you your mouse and continue to the others without the need to click on each.
- I have many feeds in the bar, and it looks sluggish that the icons are not the same. I suggest not using the favicon.
Anonymous
March 17, 2008
I think you guys are making some solid progress here. I've grown quite comfortable with the look and feel of IE7 and am pleased you are not going to change it radically.Anonymous
March 20, 2008
This is REALLY annoying...why is the Favourites Bar not movable?? I really hope that this will be "fixed" by the time the final version is released because the Links toolbar is not movable in Firefox either and that is the main reason I chose IE7 over Firefox 2 - I have lots of links in my Links folder and I want to be able to access them from a drop-down button on the right hand side, like in IE7. I don't want to be forced to have the first few shown above the tabs causing clutter and the rest being in the drop down list. Can you confirm whether this will be changed or not? It would mean a lot to me :).Anonymous
March 23, 2008
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March 24, 2008
Generally I think the whole idea is nice (Webslices), but I think too, its very limited. I can't choose some custom content to make my own webslice, instead: I'll have to wait, until some website developers get generous + in love with the technology to make it possible for me to add some webslice they've chosen. More flexiblity can be offered if it is possible too to define custom frames or browser areas to be also webslices. All-in-all: more flexibility!Anonymous
March 24, 2008
I agree with you as well, Marwan. I would much rather have ways whereby I can save snippets of regular content, rather than having to wait for web-developers to include this feature on their sites. I also think more flexibility is needed. I don't think the web-slices idea is going to be a hit at all :-(Anonymous
March 24, 2008
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March 28, 2008
Our friends over in the Internet Explorer building recently released a developer preview version of IE8.Anonymous
March 19, 2009
    안녕하세요, Internet Explorer 의 User Experience 팀의 프로그램 매니저 헬렌입니다. IE8 의 즐겨찾기 모음을 소개하게 되어 영광입니다. Anonymous
April 20, 2009
I am a user interface tester on the Internet Explorer team and one of my favorite things about any application