Internet Explorer Feature Requests

Summary: InternetExplorerFeedback about requests for new features

Other pages that might be a better place for your contributions:
* Report InternetExplorerBugs and InternetExplorerProgrammingBugs
* Discuss InternetExplorerStandardsSupport
* Discuss InternetExplorerSecurity

Please, folks: First choose a well worded, meaningful heading, then find the right alphabetical place to put your helpful heading.

Thank you for your cooperation here.

IE7 Search Setting options

Add an option to the Serch Settings, in to allow the user to choose whether to load the search into a new tab/window, or into the current window, by default. It currently loads into the current window, which is annoying if I am looking at a page and want to research some information provided. (NB: You can hit CTRL+ENTER to open results in a new tab).

Ad Blocking

The ability to right-click images on a web page and, via a context menu item, instruct IE to subsequently block images from the image's source domain. -- Innes

I totally support ad blocking, but better than Innes describes. A profile should be downloadable to prevent URIs matching certain rules from being download by the browser.

Of course, as soon as IE does this, then all of the ad sites will simply randomize their URLs and IPs and eliminate the whole point. But it would be nice for a little bit.

'Gross' Content too

This could actually be handy for blocking the occasional eye-searing nasy image as well.

One way to make this work would be for IE to keep a hash for every image, and compare image hashes to the block list just before displaying them. (This should apply to other embedded content, like Flash as well).

ActiveX Toggle

The ActiveX control should be as easy to toggle as pop-ups currently in XPSP2. Instead of the XPSP2 way by going to Manage Add-ons, you should be able to say 'activate activex' and have it turn on. Just like the pop-up manager icon on the status bar. (It really nice to navigate with Flash turned off -- but some sites require flash navigation...)

Get rid of that damned ActiveX!!!! Or at least make it possible to switch it off without it then bringing up messages that say "you need to have ActiveX to blah blah blah..." Ideally, you could have an ActiveX toggle on/off button - Peter J

Yes, ActiveX should be easy to turn off. I also want a simple "Toggle JavaScript" button. -- Philipp

Don't forget to warn before activating ActiveX. The warning currently shown when downloading binaries is too weak. Many users ignore it. --SV

A lot of the suggestions made on this page are already implemented into the updates planned for IE as part of XPSP2, specifically the Security Bar (I think it's called that) which drops down whenever an ActiveX plugin is called, or whenever a popup is called. -- BigTone

Infact, it would be better if ActiveX, and other proprietary, non-interoperable features were confined to being used in Intranets only, maybe with an option to enable it (disabled by default), so they're not such a security risk for the Internet. -- Lachlan

Why not in Windows versions prior to XP? It's so goddamn annoying. BTW I think it's ironic how IE makes more noise when you DISABLE ActiveX than when you run it --infrared

I'm going to go further and suggest that ActiveX:
* Be disabled by default
* When confronted with an ActiveX component, the "allow ActiveX" option should only have effect for that site - further components on other sites should have their own prompt
* Enabling ActiveX everywhere should require clicking a button that says "I don't care about the security of my machine"
-- Maurits

ActiveX Control by Certificates

Another way to make ActiveX less dangerous without making it useless (and it has it's uses) would be to make better use of certificates. Essentially, your browser could have a list of certificates of saftey and only ActiveX controls signed by one of these certificates can be installed by default.

Micrsoft should ship 3 basic certificates by default:
* A critical updates certificate, which is only used by Windows Update/Microsoft Update (this defaults to a no-prompt install setting)
* A Microsoft corporate certificate, which is used by all other MS groups (this defaults to a prompt to install setting)
* A Microsoft Certified Non-malicious certificate, which 3rd Parties can pay MS to certify a control as non-malicious (prompt to install). Essentially, this is to say that MS has reviewed it and found it to not be spy/malware. This should be similar to Windows Hardware Quality Logo process.

It should be possible to install additional certificates as well, so that a company can safely give it's employees access to corporate systems via ActiveX. You must be able to change the no-prompt & prompt settings for the default 3 as well, because corporations will frequently want to prohibit usage of Windows Update in favor of the corporate version (whatever it's called).

ActiveX Installation on Windows 2000 and Windows XP

It may sound old fashioned to many people here, but ActiveX installation has become difficult since Windows 2000:
* http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q280/5/79.ASP
* http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q241/1/63.ASP

This is a problem at deploying of current activeX based solutions at customers who do not use network based installations and cannot go the Active Directory way described in the articles above. I would wish some option, which allows to change the client in some easy way so that the installation works "like in NT4". It would be no problem for my scenarios to limit this installation to installation from specific "safe" hosts. The problems for the customers with installing the activex components are reported very often, by many of them, so I would be quite happy to get some alternative solution soon (not in longhorn, but in 2K/XP!!). Currently these problems cause that my chief says things like "how about porting these apps to swing based apps, which can use WebStart or something like that?"...
btw, MS is using ActiveX in it's own products, like project central, so it may be old technology, but I hope that I was allowed to post this here... ;-)

ActiveX XP Theme Support

IE should allow XP Themes for ActiveX controls without resorting to the creating a manifest for IE or running an exe out of process and drawing the window in IE. Any idea if IE7 will support XP Themes in ActiveX controls? (Will it have a manifest?)

Add-ins/Extensions

IE should have a very good add-in/extensions model (like FireFox has). Ideally, it should be a .NET interface set (Managed only, possibly other restrictions). You should be able to manipulate all manner of things inside the browser (including the ability to intercept page open attempts, examine the DOM of the page, copy images or other content from the current web page(s), etc.).

> See http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/dotnetbandobjects.asp

Note that the security issue must be handled correctly. Right now, FireFox seems to be only allowing extension to be automatically installed from it's web page (I think). Don't make this yet another opening for junkware.

Add-ins/Extensions site

Many microsoft product like: IE, MSN Search, Desktop search, .... should have Add-ins/Extensions site that allow

developer to centrally submit their add-in, easing process off marketing their add-in
Add-ins/Extensions site should be easy accessed directly from product menu
User have single place to access

I've tried MS market place, but it's not easily to access and find userfull infomation as FireFox and GDS add-in site.

The official http://ieaddons.com will be revised for improved usability. --EricLaw

Address Bar

Make URL's Easier: The Protocol - I work in corporate IT, we have stupid users (maybe we're the only ones?). One of their constant hang-ups is the whole http:// and https:// thing. Having to recount a URL for someone to type is always a pain (which slash?).

My suggestion is to remove the protocol as a directly editable portion of the URL.

Lock down the protocol portion of the URL and dim it out. That way it still remains part of the address visually, but isn't really re-typed by the user. To the LEFT of the dimmed protocol, have a slick (unobtrusive) down-arrow icon where the user can explicitly select a protocol. Otherwise, you default it to the http:// and just let the user type in the domain and rest of the URL.

Protocol "drop-down" would contain something like this when you click the "down arrow":

* http:// - Typical Web Site
* https:// - Secure Web Site (encrypted)
* ftp:// - File Transfer Site
* gopher:// - For you old-skool geeks
* enter your protocol here - Custom protocol

(Ok, don't put gopher in the default... but this demonstrates the jist of it.)

Product Wiki/Forum/Support/Knowledge base site

There should be Wiki/Forum/Support/Knowledge assesible from IE, easily navigated from one to other, linked each to other, . Wiki site for user can support each other. I love MS Wiki effort, but in my opinion mediawiki is much better tool for user communities.

It's true that currently MS have all those sites, but they are hard to access and not easy to navigate, not grouped by products.

"Allow only one instance" option.

With tabs who would ever need multiple IE windows? --Alexander Suhovey

Alternate way of caching content

I would like an alternate way for caching all kind of content like images, scripts and html. For example:

		 <img src="url.gif" md5="565ae5464834" size="34338" />

If an image with the specified md5-checksum and filesize is present in the cache the src-attribute is ignored and the image is loaded from the cache.
These new attributes "md5" and "size" could also apply to tags like "a", "iframe", "script", "style", etc. -- Thargol

No! This is not the correct place to discuss such additions to ""(X)HTML"". If you would like to submit these as proposals for XHTML2 then please feel free to join the www-html mailing list at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and send in your comments, however I don't think these extensions would be considered because caching of content is outside the scope of ""(X)HTML"", and is the responsibility of the user agent. Therefore, there should be no attrbibutes, especially not proprietary attributes included in ""(X)""HTML for this purpose. -- Lachlan Hunt

YES! This is one of the smartest things i have seen in a while. It would allow IE to cache images across sites. As browser cache sizes grow (mine is over 1GB by default) we will start seeing more and more overlap of clipart etc... across systems.

This doesn't require updating the XHTML specification (not to mention that is the W3C's job). This requires that IE maintain a database of hashes (SHA-1 and MD5 preferably to only MD5), strings and urls to prevent overlaping storage. Do to the possibility of hash collisons I don't recommend this being default behavior but it would be a nice option. --- Shining Arcanine

> This scheme has a pretty substantial number of things wrong with it. The correct cache keys to use already exist: The URL, and the ETAG. Inventing new ones is just asking for trouble.

Anti-aliasing

IE should support a CSS tag that would allow for selective anti-aliasing of text. A coder could then have the browser anti-alias the logo on the top of their page and it would look sharp and clear. This coupled with the TTF support (that i mention below) would allow for MUCH sharper, faster, smaller, better webpages - bobjase

You're suggesting this to the wrong people. Contact the W3C with this suggestion, they're the ones that define the CSS specification, not Microsoft. --- Shining Arcanine

Authentication

Support for Federated Identity. This will provide a seamless and simplified user experience where they are not interrupted with continious login prompts between integrated 3rd party sites/apps/sevices. Passport was a good first attempt. This is better

Log out support for Basic Authentication

Since browsers first started implementing basic authentication, website administrators have wanted to know how to let the user log out. Since the browser caches the username and password with the authentication realm, this is not a function of the server configuration, but is a question of getting the browser to forget the credential information, so that the next time the resource is requested, the username and password must be supplied again.

There are numerous situations in which this is desirable, such as when using a browser in a public location, and not wishing to leave the browser logged in, so that the next person can get into your bank account.

> This already exists. See ExecCommand: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/constants/clearauthenticationcache.asp --EricLaw

Auto-complete

I love auto complete but would like finer-grained control over which forms save the history. If I accidentally save a field at my banking site, I need to clear all forms to undo my mistake. I'd like to see a context menu item to clear history for that one thing. Same with usernames and passwords, of course.

> Simply go to the site, click the box, and use the arrows and delete key to remove the item you do not want saved.

Automatic Translation

A lot of the internet these days is in non-English languages; or more generally, in some language the reader doesn't understand. (Which for me is anything other than English.) It occurs to me that it really doesn't need to be that way. We have the technology to detect the language of a page. We have the technology to translate the page. (Not a wonderful translation, but enough to get the gist.) Heck, Microsoft already has versions of all this stuff in the Office product we ship today!

Internet Explorer should detect the language of the page being viewed, and automatically translate it into something that I will understand. -- Bruce

Internet Explorer should not have to detect te language of the page. Web developers should specify it using the lang-attribute on the html-tag or other tags. The lang-attribute is required when developing websites for disabled (blind) people. - Thargol

Avalon Integration

Again, don't promote Proprietary, non-interoperable solutions for use on the Internet. Maybe confine this to the localhost or Intranets. -- Lachlan

Actually Avalon could a be a great way of making web applications - we're certainly looking at it if only our paying clients are using it what does it matter whether you can? Use the right tools for the right job XHtml+CSS etc isn't always the way.

Complete integration of Avalon pages when they are hosted in the .NET WebBrowser control.

* Ensure it is possible to navigate into the DOM of an Avalon page hosted in the .NET WebBrowser control. At present this is not possible, as the WebBrowser 'document' property only returns a 'HtmlDocument' instance.
* Ensure it is possible to navigate from an Avalon page hosted in a WebBrowser control to something equivalent to window.external, so that applications can expose properties/methods to Avalon pages.

Background Image for Toolbars

So you can see the text and also the Icons better. Without having to use applications like TweakUI from Microsoft to add it - used to be a feature but was lost along the way.

Hee! No more need for Hotbar spybar ;) --infrared

Behaviours

As a corporate developer I think these things have been great; a fantastic way to encapsulate client-side code. And I still see them being used today coupled with ASP.net.
* Scaling needs to be improved. IE performance degrades as more and more behaviours are used on the page.
* Behaviours within behaviours seems to trash performance completely
* Support for writing binary behaviours against the IElementBehavior COM interface for VB6 and (I guess) .net.
* Oh and (sorry … bit of flag waving here) spell their name correctly :-)

rerd Scaling was a show-stopper for us. The basic idea is great, but our application collapsed under the weight of the overhead. We've rolled pretty much of all of them out now. It's a shame because the design is great. Modularity is an insane problem in Web Developement.

Better XHTML Editor

I've consumed a fair amount of time fixing what MSHTML does. Please resurrect Trident/MSHTML and give us an editor to be proud of. I'd like it able to produce valid XHTML. -- MikeGale

Bookmarks - Opening in New Tab

For sites saved as favorites and on the Links toolbar, allow the user to right-click and open the site in a new tab. Right now you can only open it in the current tab.

> Middle-click the items in the Favorites Center or the Links bar.

Bookmarks Toolbar Folder

I've found one very useful feature to me in Firefox that would help me move to IE7 easier more than just tabbed browsing is the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. I've practically turned it into a new menubar that I use as frequently as the menus in the Start Menu for My Docs, My Pics, Control Panel. I use it for nearly all my web browsing. I keep all my links accessible to avoid opening layers of folders to get somewhere I need quickly. (kgthunder)

Totally Agree - FF's Bookmarks Toolbar is a far better implementation than IE's Links (though that too can happily accomodate subfolders via dropdowns). And it's essential for RSS. (Slite)

Bookmarks Within a Page

When reading large amounts of text in a web page, it would be handy to be able to create in-page bookmarks and return to them quickly. The URL itself would be stored as favorite of course, but the IE toolbar could have a bookmark browser. The browser could just be a list of bookmarks for the current page. When viewing a page, and if bookmarks are enabled, you would be able to rt click or highlight text and create a bookmark. The name of the bookmark would default to BookmarkX, but you could rename it to something meaningful. Obviously this is challenging because the content of pages changes so often, so bookmarks that can't be resolved would be greyed out or just get deleted. The bookmarks could be be stored in an xml file keying off of the URL, and just to throw out a few implementation ideas, you could store it as a locational reference - line X in the page (weak), or you could write a surround algorithm that grabs the line above, the bookmark line, and the line below and stores that, then performs a text search once the page is loaded to try to re-restablish the location of the bookmark. The search would contain a certain margin of error in terms of finding an exact string comp, and once that threshold is reached, the bookmark is considered re-established.

This could be quite a useful feature, however I think there are better ways to implement it.
* Use the selected text, or the first few words of it as the bookmark label.
* If there is an ID or named anchor for the content, or on a heading or section directly above the selected content, then use that as the fragment identifier
* If there is no fragment identifier available, then generate a unique identifier, and associate it with the selected content is some way. This could be difficult, but may be useful.
* It may also be useful to extend this idea with the ability to highlight the bookmarked fragments, just like if the user had been reading the document on paper and marking with a pen or highlighter -- Lachlan Hunt

AMI Sept 06, 2004 Yes, the ability to bookmark within a page would be a great feature. Microsoft should create a standard for text/search-based intra-page tags, encoded in URLs, so that references to a section of text can be given in posts and linked-to on web pages. See this USENET post.

Great idea - would justs need a decent management tool. (Slite)

Built-in Markup Validator in Front Page

The simple and efficient way to help webpage amateurs out there to write W3C web standards compliant webpages is to give them the tools, all the tools they need at their disposal. That also means links to W3C TRs online and tutorials on how to write valid markup code.
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 "Ensure that the tool automatically generates valid markup. Priority 1"

Ensure that the markup produced by the tool, in any of its supported languages, is valid.
Publish proprietary language specifications or DTD's on the Web, to allow documents to be validated.
Use namespaces and schemas to make documents that can be automatically transformed to a known markup language.

ATAG 1.0 Ensure that the tool automatically generates valid markup#check-ensure-published-DTD

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 "If markup produced by the tool does not conform to W3C specifications, inform the author."
ATAG 1.0 If markup produced by the tool does not conform to web standards specifications, inform the author#check-declare-extended-DTD

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 "Allow the author to transform presentation markup that is misused to convey structure into structural markup, and to transform presentation markup used for style into style sheets. Priority 3"
e.g.

HTML: table-based layout into CSS.
HTML: BR to the P element.
HTML: (deprecated) FONT into heuristically or author-determined structure.
Word processor styles to Web styles.
HTML: deprecated presentational markup into CSS.

ATAG 1.0 Allow the author to transform presentation markup that is misused to convey structure into structural markup, and to transform presentation markup used for style into style sheets#check-notify-on-schedule

"The whole reason nearly all Web pages on the Internet are malformed is because browsers let Web page authors get away with it. As long as browsers are permissive in their error handling and recovery, Web authors will continue to produce invalid Web pages, because they won't even have any idea the pages they are authoring are invalid! (...) people who don't work on Web browsers for a living have no concept of just how malformed the Web really is" coming from http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_01.html#004702

--DU/GT

Built-in Webpage Quality indicator icon

Implement a feature which will report back to the user if a page uses valid code, has markup errors and/or parsing CSS errors: some sort of a Webpage Quality indicator icon (smiley or green check for valid page, frown or red 'X' when invalid) on the statusbar (or somewhere else) which when clicked would report more info to the user and give him more options among which one would be to validate the page with the World Wide Web Consortium validator.

Implement something like HTML Tidy as an extension or an option into IE 7 and for IE 7 users. Amaya 9.2.1 reports parsing errors. Icab 2+ reports parsing errors and other errors (warnings about deprecated elements and/or attributes). Dillo browser reports common errors and mistakesmeter.html (improper nesting, attribute format) in webpages. BBedit and BB Tidy also reports frequently encountered markup errorschecking/#toperrors like improper nesting, absence of doctype decl., usage of <font>, <center>, non-standard or deprecated tag attributes, etc.

W3C HTML 4.01 specs recommend browsers to notify users about markup/syntax errors in pages: 'We also recommend that user agents provide support for notifying the user of such errors.'#h-B.1 http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.1 -- DU/GT

Silent recovery from error is harmful, in particular for improper nesting of elements (malformed markup code), missing closing quotes, incorrect attribute values, etc... "*Agents that recover from error by making a choice without the user's consent are not acting on the user's behalf.* (...) Experience with the cost of building a user agent to handle the diverse forms of ill-formed HTML content convinced the designers of the XML specification to require that agents fail upon encountering ill-formed content. Because users are unlikely to tolerate such failures, this design choice has pressured all parties into respecting XML's constraints, to the benefit of all." coming from: Architecture of the World Wide Web: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#no-silent-recovery "The whole reason nearly all Web pages on the Internet are malformed is because browsers let Web page authors get away with it. As long as browsers are permissive in their error handling and recovery, Web authors will continue to produce invalid Web pages, because they won't even have any idea the pages they are authoring are invalid! (...) people who don't work on Web browsers for a living have no concept of just how malformed the Web really is" coming from http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_01.html#004702

--DU/GT

Bug Tracking System

I've gotten real tired of having to cruise around 20+ non-MS websites and trying to hunt things down in Google in order to find out about bugs in IE and how to correct for them. A bug tracker should be provided so that...
* There is a central repository of IE bug information
* People would be aware that MS knows about bugs (reducing MS's work done processing bug reports)
* People would have some indication when/if something is being done to address bugs

Set up a public Bugzilla bug tracking system, or equivalent, for developers to submit bug reports, patches, etc. -- lachlan.hunt

> A site on Microsoft Connect was created to track bugs. It's public today, and will not require Login shortly.

Certificates

I am not sure if the IE team works on certificate DLL's, but it would be nice if an option would be added to "always trust x". Signing an object doesn't mean it is safe, but end-user Joe won't figure that. Perhaps there may be a way to allow Flash, but to reject forever coolwebsearch. Note: I'm sure most of this is already available in the SP2 public preview. -- BigTone

> Add the certificate to your Trusted Publishers store.

Color Coded Source Code Viewer

Support for colorized and formatted markup, something similar to FireFox's viewer or VS.NET's editor.
Also show the updated state of the markup code that is dynamically modified/updated by Javascript.

Color Managed (ICC Color Profile support)

Photographers (pro and amateur) want IE to use embedded ICC color profiles when displaying images. Applications such as the Microsoft Office 2003 suite, Windows Image and Fax Viewer and of course image editing tools like Photoshop are already "color managed", so there are clearly Microsoft developers very familiar with the need and the code. Digital photography has taken off in a big way as have photo-sharing web pages. IE is the main way that we view our photos. To show it is serious about the "digital wave" Microsoft needs to support this fundamental requirement for accurate photo display. The Safari browser already does. I suspect it may already be supported on IE7 for Vista, but IE7 for XP needs to be color managed also. -- lance

Isn't this covered by the new XP powertool for ICC profiles? (Slite)

Contenteditable - standards support

It would be so nice if contenteditable would generate standards compliant code. I would like to be able to specify whether the code generated should be XHTML or HTML compliant. Why should it be necessary to mess around with tidy when IE should have it all built in? -- mhelt

Context Menu

* "Open in This Window" options that loads site in this window, even if target is _blank
* "Open in this/new tab" options
* "Block images from this server" option
* "Block everything from this server" option
* open all marked links in new windows?
I use "Open in New Window" quite a lot (it was already stated in here to allow the middle button for this, SHIFT key is not as simple), however what annoys me is that some pages use JavaScript to handle the link and open a customised window (custom size, border, etc.) which often results in an error message because the JavaScript relies on a function in the old page which is not available anymore. The problem is that you don't know if it's a normal link or a "script" link until you try it. IE 7 should detect this condition, i.e. a script already intends to open a new window, and just execute the script as if clicked normally. -- oliverjonas

Context Menu Extensions

Developer Context Menu Extensions are great, but a little limited. I want a way to create Context Menu sub-Menus (like IE's built-in Encoding menu). This would help developers avoid cluttering IE's main Context Menu. -- RobEberhardt, ssPowerTools for IE

User Customization of Context Menu Commands and Submenus

A user of Internet Explorer who has no experience in programming should be allowed to customize the context menu with a special command to add customized searches, so he can browse faster. The user should also be able to create submenus in the context menu, so the context menu doesn't get cluttered with lots of search commands.

Cookie Management

Better control over cookie settings and a manager to view and delete cookies and to manage site blocks/allows. See this example

It is complicated to add the URLs of allowed or blocked cookies to the filter because many web sites change URLs and domains while the user is browsing on these pages (e.g. checking email). It would be much easier for the user to tell the browser to track the URLs of cookies and add them to an 'allow' or a 'block' filter. For example, you want to read your emails at http://www.hotmail.com
Before you open the page you turn on the cookie tracking feature, which might be accessed through the status bar, and choose 'Accept cookies'. Now you open the web site, work with your account and log out. After that you go again to the cookie icon at the status bar and remove the checkmark of the cookie tracking feature. This means that the tracking stops and the cookies necessary for working with your email account will be accepted from now. The filter entries are generated automatically by the browser and the user doesn't have to care about the dozens of URLs and domains he is referred to while browsing a web site.

IE must have a "protect this sites cookies" feature to click on and off. Then you delete the rest in one click. Should also have a cookie blocker with wildcards, and an import option to load up lists of unwanted cookies (that could even be given as a regular download. just think, MS could control all advertising cookies when using the IE browser. (Slite)

Cookie Management - Part 2

In addition to the above cookie management options, it would be useful to have the ability to globally delete all cookies based on age. This could be very much the same as the Browser History setting. For example, you could set a "Max Cookie Age = 20 days". Any cookie older than 20 days would automatically be deleted.

We're currently facing a few public disclosure requests where all cookies have been requested for a particular group of users. In order to protect important personal information, it would be useful to only permit a cookie history window than allow our users to potentially maintain cookies in perpetuity.

CSS3

When CSS level 3 becomes the recommendation, please support the calc#calc function. This function could be a huge improvement to the quality of life of designers everywhere.

Data: URLs

An easy way to embed data inline (ie. embedding a bullet-graphic in a CSS file), hence reducing server round trips. As described in RFC 2397 -- Agalab

Databound Events and Scrollable Table Bodies

As a corporate developer, I think it would be useful to be able to modify the data binding process via events. The events should allow you to take the value that was about to be displayed by the normal process and cancel it, so you can script your own process to happen. Specifically for me, the three things that I'd like to be able to do are:

Apply the databound value to a different attribute than the default one,
Format the value before it's displayed
Catch the value before it's updated in the DSO, so I can strip any of my formatting.

Also, scrollable Table Bodies would be nice, the current solution does not help much when you want the table to have a dynamic width/height.

Scrollable table bodies are already possible using CSS. It just requires IE to support CSS better, but I think it already supports this:

		  @tbody { height: ?; overflow: scroll; }@

--Lachlan Hunt

Devs may find this interim scrolling table solution useful. --RobEberhardt

"(...) This division THEAD, TFOOT and TBODY elements enables user agents to support scrolling of table bodies independently of the table head and foot. When long tables are printed, the table head and foot information may be repeated on each page that contains table data." coming from HTML 4.01, section 11.2.3 Row groups: the THEAD, TFOOT, and TBODY elements#h-11.2.3
navigating THEAD, TBODY, TFOOT with CSS overflow styling at WAI

Here's my own cross-browser workaround (entirely web stnadards compliant) for scrolling tbody:
Cross-browser scrolling tbody
--DU/GT

Debugging Support For Web Developers

* Strict modes for web developers which immediately identifies errors in CSS or HTML.
* Page info which includes all the links (link elements from head), metadata, etc, and the HTTP headers used in the request and response.
* Indicates whether the data are compressed for a particular page.
* User agent switcher, to see what happens when you want to test server-side changeing output for browsers but don't have them.
* Page quality indicator, which tells the user how little/much effort the developer put into html. Did they pollute the page with inline styles, table layouts, and javascript?

> Most of this is possible using Microsoft Fiddler. http://www.fiddlertool.com. Also check out the IE Developer Toolbar.

Developer Features

I think an enhanced version of Internet Explorer tailored to developers would be fantastic. A CSS debugger, built-in markup validator, JS console (already mentioned below). I think that the IE team could really push the envelope and offer better features geared specifically to developers and make these features available directly in the IE UI, or as an IE expansion pack, a developer edition if you will, to keep the consumer browser lightweight and easy to use. Some other features I'd like to see is emulation capability. Such as emulation of mobile device browsers, the ability to switch to print preview mode directly in the browser window to make styling of content for print easier. Being a developer I spend a great deal of time opening and closing browser windows, be it IE, Mozilla or Opera, the ability to synchronize Favorites with third-party browsers would also be an immensely convienient feature. It need to be more than just an import feature however, I'd like to be able to tell IE where my Mozilla bookmarks are and tell it to synchronize Favorites with Mozilla bookmarks. Why wouldn't some of these features be better added to something like FrontPage? I think that such features are better if included directly in the browser and greatly increases the convenience of designing content for multiple devices. If done right this would greatly increase IE's respectability among the developer community. -- Richard York

Here are the features I'd like to see as a IE Dev
* View the DOM in a treeview
* The Script Debugger Command window available from within IE
* DOM inspector (click element to view DOM innerHtml, state, events etc...)
* View Running source versus view actual source - i.e view source that actually exists in DOM including all dynamic changes at that time versus the static file.
* View Headers without needing a plugin (like ieHeaders)
* Debug support for server side script callbacks
* Cookie viewer/editor
* Validator mode which checks for standards compliance
* Performance view show render times for elements in DOM, number of times methods are called, objects created, memory usage etc...
-- AlexM

Dialogs

Modal Dialogs should load their content like all the other pages do and not preferring the local cache entries.

HTML opened in Modal Dialogs respects correct caching headers. If you set a caching header indicating the content should not be reused, it won't be. -- EricLaw

Devs may also find these interim dialog fixes and extensions useful. --RobEberhardt

DirectX Acceleration

Perhaps add some ability to have video card accelerated graphics, very much like how Windows Media Player now has their DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration). Web pages can be very rich, and should take advantage of the powerful GPUs just sitting around with up to 256MB.

Document Size

IE currently chokes when rendering pages of over several hundred K. In our application we use the webbrowser control to display arbitrary (local) content. For display of large datasets we have to resort to various kluges to break it into pages; this of course breaks things like IE's built in Find, Print, etc. - browserhound

DOM Level 2 Traversal and Range Specification Support

DOM traversal capabilities, as specified in the W3C recommendations, are extremely helpful in writing unobtrusive modular scripts. There are some workarounds available now, but of course native support would be much better. Thanks!

http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Traversal-Range-20001113/

Download Manager

A simple download manager, like Firefox or Opera. This should have the option to 'Download in the Background' (or something) using the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITSstartpage.asp), the same as windows update. Should also start downloading directly to the destination folder specified by the user (rather than to the cache) and support resume (also like firefox and opera etc...).

I also really love Opera's feature to start downloading while I still search for the folder to save the file in. IE shoul have this feature too. Sometimes the download is already complete before I selected the folder. That saves a lot of time. - Daniel

a download manager as in mozilla 1.7 would be great so as not to clutter the task bar. -Richard

download manager: resume downloads, PAUSE downloads, open files from the manager (with security warnings for binaries!), remove two-simultaneous downloads restrictions, low priority for downloads?

Have every download begin as soon as you click Save As... (also, have hotkeys to download. Say AltCtrlLeft Click to download image, AltCtrlS to Save Web page as Archive, and the like).

Then, open up another window, side panel, or tab (if we're getting tabs as a feature) that is the download manager. This will list all active downloads. Each download should list what page it was downloaded from, too.

From here, you can open downloaded items (when they complete) or save them (you should be able to do this before they finish downloading). This page should keep track of where you save items, so that you can just drag additionaly items to any folder you've used before. This should try to intelligently notice common roots. For instance, if I store all my software downloads as sub folders of a 'Software Downloads' folder it should eventually notice this and list the Software Downloads folder as a target, even if I've never downloaded anything directly to that folder. Each entry in this list should have a sub-area (labeled 'In a subfolder') that, if you drop a file on that area pops ups and asks you which subfolder of that entry to use. Naturally, you should be able to multi-select downloaded items from this screen.

Also, this page ought to included automatic queing of downloads to prevent a large number of downloads from choking your upstream (I second the suggestion to use BITS for this purpose).

This page should be persistent across browser sessions. The downloads should continue (via BITS) even when IE has been closed. Downloads that get cut off due to a reboot should restart automatically. You should be able to halt downloads from here, and clear old downloads. However, old downloads should go into history (and you should be able to search your old downloads from this page).

A final feature (this is more complex than I realized at first) is that for any download, it should compute an MD5 hash (and keep track of that). If you've already downloaded an item before, this page should alert you to that fact (IE will know, since it will have the same MD5 hash). In any case, the MD5 hash could be used to check the integrity of the download (manually, for now).

Doing "File/Save-As", the file name appears as "Channel9 Wiki" which is the title of this page. However I always would like to be able to quickly see the URL ( http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/wikiedit.aspx?topic=Channel9.InternetExplorerFeatureRequests ) for any web pages that I have saved, since the title is often not enough description for me. I do have a specialized download manager software which can do this and more, however right now I'm on a public computer that only has internet explorer and firefox on it, and neither of these softwares do this as yet (yet I think, both could be improved so that they do). I'd suggest that there could be developed a way (under Tools/Internet Options) of specifying what the default filename will be. For example "%T %U" can mean the title followed by a space followed by the URL. The URL could be automatically modified when it is put into the filename, so that it uses valid characters for a filename; for example "/" or "\" or "." will need to be automatically replaced by some other valid character or abbreviation, such as bs or fs or dot .

Download Open/Open Folder options

You should be able to choose Open or Open Folder before the download completes; when the download completed, the Download window would disappear and either the file or folder would open. (Note that you should not get an 'Open Folder' button if you saved to desktop; I've entered that misfeature on the bugs page, too)

I also would like to see a feature to set up default download folder depending on the file type/extension being downloaded. If a default folder was not registered for an extension it should use the default/last download folder.

Downloading Large Files Should Bypass IE Cache

Currently, when downloading large files and choosing to save instead of directly opening them, IE (sometimes?) downloads them into the cache (Temporary Internet Files) first, then copies them to the specified target directory. This has two implications: first, the download takes significantly longer than necessary because of the coyping after downloading (and due to the high hard disk activity during copying, the whole system gets slower while copying); second, you can't download files larger than the space on the partition holding the cache even if the target directly has enough free space. --FabianSchmied

Embedded Images

Allow a developer to embed images by using base64 encoding and implementing date:URI
Example at Opera Show Format_fileformat.html
Both Opera and Mozilla browsers render the image, but Internet Explorer does not (so will need one of these to see it in action). - sbc

> DATA URI support is covered above. Most folks don't understand the true performance implications of these URIs. -- EricLaw

Encryption

AES support would be a nice addition to the next version of IE. 128 bit is a must, 192 and 256 bit could be part of a security add-on if need be. (Note: IIS doesn't support AES encryption yet either, but certain other web-servers do)

> Windows Vista IE7+ supports AES and ECC.

Errors and Troubleshooting

Improve Error Messages: The "Cannot find server or DNS Error" is not very informative. It would be much better to display something like 'DNS : request time-out', 'DNS : Non-existent domain', 'TCP error : connection refused/time-out/host unreachable' 'HTTP error : connection closed before answer/not a http server'.

Move (some) diagnostic functions into the browser: Many users have difficulty finding the network control panel, let alone running ipconfig in a cmd window. It would be great if some (simplified?) version of this diagnostic information could be added to the browser. My recommendation would be to put into into a magic page like "about:network" but I guess a menu item would be almost as easy for users to find. Also, it would be great if this could include a simple network test -- a subset of the system scan you get from the "Network Diagnostics" that opens from 'netsh diag gui'.

> Windows Vista IE7+ has a Network Diagnostics feature built-in.

Events

More events, like "onHover(30)" where 30 is the millisecond count. - bobjase

You can already do timed events with html+time see here It's implemented in IE. - Thargol

Extensions

A way to extend IE using web technologies. Much like how Firefox does extensions. Using a hybrid CSS / JavaScript XHTML language - like XUL Embracing XUL will also help developers, as they can write an application that can be run on several browsers and platforms - rather than just Windows. Working with other browser manufactures (Mozilla, Opera) on the Web Forms 2.0 spec will also greatly benefit users and developers. - sbc

External Links

When a link is clicked in an external program (i.e., from an email in Outlook), open the site in a new tab instead of the existing tab. Or even give a set of options in the control panel so a user can choose how they want the new link to open.

> Already done. Tools | Internet Options | General | Tab Settings.

Faster Javascript

Javascript is very slow to tick large numbers of checkboxes currently in Internet Explorer (e.g. see: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/msg/a9b1cd6a4de8e4c3?q=IEslowjavascriptmozillainternet.explorer&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&rnum=3 ). For example, in Internet Explorer, the speed is around 70 checkboxes ticked or unticked per second via Javascript, so updating a list of 6000 checkboxes would take around one and a half minutes (during which the browser appears to be frozen). However, when using the Mozilla Firefox browser, on the same computer with the same web page (so same Javascript and the same list of 6000 items), it takes only 1 or 2 seconds to tick or untick the entire list. - nickj

Favorites

I don't like to deep hierarchies with folders, sub-folders and maybe even sub-sub-folders and so on. For example: I have one favorites-folder "News" with local newspapers, regional-newspapers, tv-news, weather,... Each of this has only 2-4 entries, but to keep them clear I have to make sub-folders for local, weather, tv, and so on.

It would be much clearer and better, if IE would have separator lines like Mozilla. Then I only need one folder "news" where I seperate the groups of 2-4 pages. With that, there is no need for subfolders in many cases. And of course it must be possible to not only sort bookmarks by name, date, and so on, but in a personal order, like Mozilla and Opera can. Then you can sort them the way you want and how it is logic to you and not only by name...

* better maintenance functions
* resizeable window
* better drag & drop, including dislocation into new directories
* sorting functions
* grouping
* option to auto bookmark frequently visited sites
* search functions
* onMouseOver functions, Pop-up-menues, multiple hierarchies
* offline menue for favourites (some know-how should be available offline), some not

Resizeable favorites organizational window, with better options for sorting by name, date visited, number of visits and perhaps by category as defined by MSN Search? A password-restricted and encrypted favorites folder would be a welcome addition for the millions of users whose favorite sites are nobody's business but their own.

Password restriction and encrypted files could probably be handled better with multiple user profiles, but I don't see why bookmarks should be encrypted anyway. Who cares what pages your looking at, unless your looking at something you shouldn't be? Anyway, this can already be done by setting up multiple windows logon accounts, and Win 2000/XP support file encryption and folder permissions to prevent other users getting access to your Documents and Settings folder. So, I assume Windows Longhorn will also support something equivalent to that. It may also be useful to add user profiles like Mozilla has, but it may not be necessary. -- Lachlan Hunt

I loved the way favorites were managed in MSN Explorer - I liked the easy way you could create and rearrange them, the thumbnail of the page that was generated so you could see where you were going to wind up when you clicked on it, and most of all, the fact that the favorites were online (did this get canned when "Hailstorm" went out the window?) was cool - it meant my favorites could "follow" me between different machines (there's no easy way to export / import faves at the moment - short of just copying the folder). The current favorite management functionality in IE is clunky, hasn't changed since version 3 / 4, and is inconsistent with the rest of Windows! -- Adam Young.

What I really want for Favourites is the ability to attach multiple categories (or labels) to each Favourite (similar to how Gmail works). This would be very handy when I'm searching for information on a topic later. The problem at the moment is I may save a link that's related to data binding in .NET it that Favourites folder, however that link may also contain handy information on SQL, Custom Controls, and creating Data Access classes. If I want to see a list of all Favourites related to Custom Controls it should pick up that Favourite, but currently it doesn't. Taking this approach would eliminate the need for folders and would provide a similar experience to WinFS (I think). The ability to rank Favourites may also be handy. - Brett

I would like to be able to edit the page title before adding to the favorites list. I would like to add some remarks about what to look for in a page when adding multiple URLs fast into the favorites for later viewing. After sometime, the purpose that a page was bookmarked in the first place is forgotten. This would be a complementary feature vide the bookmark within page" feature - it may point to a particular location within a web page. - L. Mohan Arun

I think that autoclasifing and searching by meta tags would be great. Every web search engine in the world use it, as URL name, titles and other parameters, but just for favourites. Keeping favorites classified actualy is a hell on every web browser. Too much time consuming. I think I've several good ideas, but hard of telling here becouse my poor English. Even there is some posibility of autosorting/autoclasifing using an external web search engine line google or msn search (or even using the keywords you used in the search engine when you where dig for the web page) but please, keep it automagicaly.

YES, YES, YES - meta tags are the way to go for Favourites management. Just do it like GMAIL - sites could even hold common tags so it could auto-group, for example, all BBC sites together. And can the Brits get their missing letter 'u' back please? (only joking - couldn't give a proverbial).

Also, and I know this isn't strictly IE territory, but I'm sure they have influence...Can we get a 'Bookmark Title' tag built into the standard for html headers. I get fed up always having to edit page title down to something manageable (like simple Amazon.co.uk).

So there we go - 4 action points...
- Scrap plain folders and use Meta Tags (that, obviously could be displayed as virtual folders) for Favorites.
- Persuade the PtB that "Bookmark Meta" should now be in the .html header.
- While they're at it - add in "Bookmark Title" too. Make that the default entry for Ctrl+D.
- Put a decent management front end on it (IE6's is useless - most sane people use explorer instead).

(Slite)

Favorite 'Sessions'

add a feature helpful to researchers so that we can get back to a research project, days or years later even if we have cleared the cache or history... before starting to surf, we would select a 'session' function, name it, and the sequence of links we surf would be saved in a separate folder for later use. the full links or page titles could be accessible or exportable as a text file, for easy cut and paste into bibliographies, most importantly, groups of favorites could be saved and added to at anytime in an easier to view 'history' like file, instead of the hierarchichal 'favorites' style, which is not so useful for opening up lots of webpages at once for cross referencing several open windows. Start a msn session could also be a great marketing campaign for your next version launch of ie!

Favorites into Images

I remember reading about an R&D project to aid the speed of which users could visually search through their documents by turning the icon of the file into a geometric picture dependent on its contents. The whole project didn’t have me convinced for obvious reasons; that there are only do many combinations and how can a computer accurately interpret the info in the document to create a relevant icon?!

The current way of searching for something which relies heavily on an image is an image itself, better to use this differentiation than a made up pattern, and so I think that turning a normal picture into a story would work better.

The two snags would be number one that the article has to have an image with it, for most articles this is true thankfully, the other catch would be the image file itself which would have meta-data fields for the story to go in.

How can an image be a story? Simple, it can be done today, but not with all image files, only those that allow for meta-data fields:

Find an online news article that has a JPEG picture, save this with a relevant file name of the story e.g. ‘Worlds Strongest Woman’ now in the properties/meta-data fields add the article body text (copy & paste) then add some more info like category, author, date (written in M/D/Y format specific to users location, come on lets make this intelligent or have date displayed 27th July 2005), URL and a title (if so desired , but not a necessity because of the files name).

Now the story is an image, I am doing this manually with lots of interesting articles from tech sites that always have pictures like those from www.engadget.com (sorry for the ad), the catch is to make it easy for the user, a one-click process.

An option in Windows Vista Browser/IE7 should allow a user to hover over a picture and select ‘Save Image as an Article’, the browser then automatically saves the image with the title of the story and starts to add meta-data: the title field, the URL and the story itself.

Obviously the whole idea is that the browser (or whatever we will be using) will collect all the relevant data correctly every time with no mistakes, but I think some users would like more control, so (if configured) the browser would:

i) Show, in a separate window, a fit-to-page view of the page(s) with the sections of the article highlighted to denote what will be collated into the picture, much like the print preview in IE.

iia) The browser uses pointers or tags to denote what text to save

iib) The whole article is boxed and highlighted in relevant sections and selectable, like the MSN Hotmail Image uploaded app by clicking on a box the check box is either selected or not with an ‘x’ for use in some kind of 10% transparent colour.

iii) The computer would then learn what kind of stuff I like and my habits so I could just trust it, especially on regular sites, the website could make it easy by working to standards and a format of their own, after a few goes I would trust them.
Maybe in the options tab have a hi/low bar setting so ‘Low’ = not much info selected, and ‘High’ = most of the pages text.

Most images online are JPEG, however to avoid the problems of images with no meta-data fields instead of displaying “Sorry this file contains no room for meta-data, no-can-do” add an option, when say hovering over say a GIF or BMP file, of converting the file on the fly to a JPEG/JPG (I don’t know the difference) and the process would begin.

A similar feature which instantly creates Word documents for articles that have no pictures, based on the same principal by collating all the relevant information like URL and the story, maybe the websites logo as a picture, but no adverts!!

The next scenario would be on the computer, I would like to see Windows Vista use the meta-data info effectively and behave according to what is in its properties, and I’m not just referring to the date/time/author organisation of the picture/story. Rather have some kind of superimposed transparent corner strip to signify ‘it’s a story’ which separates it from ‘genuine’ images, or some kind of new menu would appear - maybe have an option to visit the website or search for similar stories but more recent!!

Now don’t tell me this wouldn’t be a better way of saving news stories rather than as hyperlinks that get lost and are hard to navigate.

Samuel, UK

I've just returned to IE (temporarily I hope) because of my new keyboard with fingerprint reader. Please, please introduce Firefox's feature of being able to keep a "bookmark search" field permantly docked at the top of the bookmark column that you can make run down the left hand side of the browser.

Also, please make that search field do "live" searches on your bookmark file. I have hundred of good bookmarks, which I do organise as best I can, but firefox's live searching of bookmarks is a daily life saver. For me its nearly a make-or-break feature.

(one week later) Could you also try and impliment firefox's feature on allow you to keep more than one bookmark folder expanded within the favorties sidebar? There are usually two or three favorites folders I want expanded at any one time.

Hilary.

> This is an option in Tools | Internet Options | Advanced. Uncheck "Close unused folders in history and favorites"

FavIcon

* Use the favicon.ico file as the icon in the Windows taskbar instead of the generic IE logo. At work when I have several applications open I can usually only see the icon and the first 3 letters of the title bar name. Seeing 5 generic IE logo's on the taskbar doesn't help me quickly identify the needed application.
* Make IE understand favicon.gif and favicon.jpg instead of just favicon.ico.
* Store the icon permanently. What is the point of people creating the icons when they get cleared out of the temp storage. I have a bunch of links, and every single one of them has the generic IE icon.
* Yes, I second this making of the favicon permanent. I drives me insane trying to get unique identifiable icons for my websites only to have IE genericise them. Firefox is better at this, but it too sometimes looses the icons.

How about embedding the FavIcon in the shortcut file.

Feeds Collections

I think IE 7 should include the Feeds Collections feature. A Feeds Collection is a folder where you store feeds items that are about a particular topic you are interested in. When you create a new Feeds Collection, you are asked to assign to it one or more keywords that best describe what you are looking for. Then the Feeds Collection will search from all the feeds you have subscribed for the articles that contain any combinations of the keywords you have specified. After the searching is done, these articles matching your criteria will be stored in this Feeds Collection. The Feeds Collections are also capable of keeping itself updated by monitoring any incoming feeds. This is great because the users could subscribe to hundreds of feeds without having to read all of them regularly to find the articles they are interested in. The articles they like to read now come to them every day, which is amazing. It also helps the users to keep themselves updated on a particular news event by providing them the latest news report on that event. The user could narrow down the range of articles by providing very specific keywords.

Find

The Find dialog initially comes up with an empty 'Find What' box. I'd like it to use the current selection, if the current selection is text.

The Find dialog is modal. This makes it difficult to copy text from multiple locations or to follow links, or see the whole context if the text is found near the edges of the window. The dialog doesn't remember where the last instance of the search text was found, beginning from the top of the document every time.

> Find Dialog is no longer modal in IE7.

Find As You Type

Introduced in Mozilla, Find As You Type allows users to quickly find links on a page by typing. -- DalanGalma

This feature should have an configuration option to search the whole text, not just links. And do not copy that stupid Mozilla sound.

This would be a very good feature. When I have IE open (though, that rarely happens) and I start typing expecting it to search, I find it very frustrating, that I have to stop and press Ctrl+F first. I like the mozilla sound, but of course, it should be configurable, to select any audio file the user has or select from a list of included sounds. This applies whenever sound is used in the application. -- Lachlan Hunt

I'd just like to add something to this; Even in Firefox/Mozilla Find as you type only goes to the first link. What would really be nice is if there were multiple links with the same name on the page, there would be a context menu that would show this. Especially good for long scrolling pages.

Update: Its almost like they were listening to me ;). The latest Firefox release 1.0PR does exactly this. Check it out. -- x-wing

The find as you type is a good idea, but my request would be a text box (in the status bar) that a user can click in to do a "find as you type". The Mozilla find as you type feature annoying when visiting webpages that require keystroke input for javascripted games etc. -- Brent Silby

Flash Control

"most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people" Jakob Nielsen, october 2005, Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 "Flash collected the bronze medal for annoyance" http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html

The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004 - 12. Misusing Flash Most of the time: no skip intro button, no way to turn off music, no way to stop download, no reasonable way for the user to have full control over the flash movie/animation. The frustration/powerlessness is worse, more acute for people on dial-up connection. "You have to watch a boring, soundless, twenty second flash intro with no option to skip it. If you're still around when the content loads, the pain doesn't stop. There is a lovely 8 or 10 second delay between when you click one of the navigation options and when the content actually arrives." Vincent Flanders

When a flash object is on a web page, it should not be automatically downloaded and played. Instead, a placeholder should show up instead allowing you to start the flash. This way, you don't waste time with bad flash content--you only see the flash items you want to see. This way, the download is not slowed down for dial-up users by unexpected, unwanted and unrequested flash content.

The same should probably true of any embedded object on web pages that uses external software to render--Java applets, SVG (if SVG support is not added to IE7), and so on.

Of course, this should be configurable--some people might reasonably want to always start Flash or other content. Also, in the configuration it should allow you to specify whether you want it to:
* activate automatically
* download automatically, but not activate until you click it
* download and activate only after you click it
The third option would be very much appreciated by users with modem dial-up connections and would be handy for lower speed links, too.

I support very much this feature request; in fact, Seamonkey 1.x and Firefox 1.x have FlashBlock extension doing that. --DU/GT

Focusing a secondary window and the target attribute

If a hyperlink opens in a new named window, and that window already exists, Request feature is: IE 7 should switch focus to that named window and bring back that named window on top/in front of its opener/parent. This should/would work even if javascript support (Active scripting) is disabled. Just @<a href="..." target="WindowName">@ would be enough to trigger such focusing mechanism

WHY: this would reduce focusing problems and compensate for poor coding practices frequently encountered on the web.

I've seen this lots of times with beginner users. If a hyperlink opens a page in a new named window, and that window already exists in the background, the page will load in that window but it will not be brought back in front. The user sits there clicking the link repeatedly saying "It's not working". You may not think this is a major thing, but I've seen it destroy a user's task on countless occasions.

I've read countless of posts requesting help in web programming newsgroups on this issue, though more often regarding window.open-ed windows actually.

"The biggest fault with pop-ups is that it takes the focus away from the main browser window, and this can be disconcerting. It presents general usability issues aside from accessibility. How often have you seen someone launch a pop-up and then inadvertently click back on the launcher window and thinking that nothing's happened, click the link again with nothing happening? Of course the window has opened but is now under the launcher window, and only moving down to the task-bar and selecting the window from there will solve this." Ian Lloyd in http://www.accessify.com/tutorials/the-perfect-pop-up.asp

"New browser windows can make an already cluttered taskbar even more difficult to use. We've all spent ages hunting through the taskbar in search of the window we want."
Beware of Opening Links in a New Window:http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beware-opening-links-new-window

"Furthermore, Windows XP groups multiple windows of the same application in the taskbar, so there is virtually no visible indication that a new window has even been opened." Mark Pilgrim in Dive into Accessibility, Not opening new windows16notopeningnew_windows.html

"current operating systems have miserable window management" J. Nielsen regarding Opening New Browser Windows in The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design

Several other interesting quotes at: http://www.gtalbot.org/FirefoxSection/Popup/PopupAndFirefox.html#ExcerptsRenownedSources

"some people can use Windows applications for years without understanding the concept of task switching. (When I point to the task bar and ask them what it's for, they can't tell me.) (...) In another recent study, six out of 17 users had difficulty with multiple windows, and three of them required assistance to get back to the first window and continue the task." Carolyn Snyder, Seven tricks that Web users don't know, 7. Second browser windows_7tricks.htm#7 June 2001
--DU/GT

Fonts

* minimum font-size entirely settable by the user
* a first-run wizard for choosing the preferred, i.e. default, and minimum font-size, maybe even family (at least serif or sans-serif)
* For those of us with minor visual difficulties (or monster monitors set on the maximum resolution,) reading details on a webpage can be tough. A certain other browser that won't be mentioned lets you hit Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to scale the font size at will, then drop it back to its "regular" size. IE still only gives you five scaling choices (Smallest, Smaller, Medium, Larger, Largest.) Can an <<other-browser>>-like font scaling system be implemented? How hard would it be?

Font size control according to Jakob Nielsen

"IE4 had a great UI that let users easily change font sizes; let's get this design back in the next generation of browsers. (...) I'm hereby launching a campaign to get Microsoft to make user preferences override any fixed font size specification in Web designs."

"Simplifying Browser Font Control

Unfortunately, recent versions of IE have eliminated IE4's good design, replacing it with an approach that has two serious usability problems:

* The text size button is no longer visible by default. Only the minuscule percentage of users who customize their toolbars will get this highly useful button. Most users see instead the default toolbar, which is polluted with buttons that have much less utility. Because the feature is hidden, few users realize that their browser can change text size.
* Separate buttons no longer exist for text-bigger and text-smaller. If users can find it at all, they'll get a single button to control both directions of text change. (...)

Improving Future Browsers
Reverting to IE4's design for the Mac would be a great step forward for font size usability."

Every quotes coming from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 19, 2002:
Let Users Control Font Size

Please note that text resizing is clearly and distinctly different from resizing all the elements of a webpage (also referred as page zooming). Page zooming increases the document box, generating scrollbars; text resizing should not increase document box. --DU/GT

Form sumbit / enter key behavior

If a form has only one text box and a submit button then the ENTER key will not submit form unless the focus is on the submit button. If the form has two or more text boxes then the ENTER key will submit the form even if the focus is on one of the text boxes. It would be great if the ENTER key worked the same way regardless of the number of text inputs on the form. We have many forms that only need one text input and we end up having to add extra text inputs and try to hide them with styles just to get the ENTER key to behave. This appears to be bug. --Matthew MacFarland

Frames Rethought

Frames are a great basic idea that has languished. I'd like something in the browser with:
* I can define a toolbar in the page. It's in a separate file, it looks like part of the browser UI (if I want), my page can talk to it, it can talk to my page (client side).
* A page comes in it loads the frame/s type content. No fuss no muss it just happens cause I defined it on the page!
MikeGale

Gecko Rendering Engine

The Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla should be used instead of the current rendering engine as it is too slow.

And the current one doesn't support the standards properly. -- Robotii

I was so tempted to just obliterate this change to the page. Gecko is completely incompatible with the existing IE renderer - both external interfaces and with many websites that render just fine in IE. As for relative speed, some sites render faster in one, some in the other. Users have reported differing results depending on the speed of their hardware and their internet connections. Frankly, unless you start from identical hardware and empty caches, and access the exact same sites at the exact same time, you can't say whether one is quicker than another. Even then one browser's connection might be handled well by the web server while the other stalls for some reason. -- MikeDimmick

My request is to continue to develop IEs rendering engine. Don't use Gecko. Gecko currently contains many speed problems with dhtml animation. It is too slow. IE is very fast for dhtml. -- Brent Silby

If Gecko isn't to be used, then IE really needs to improve its rendering engine. It's speed isn't a problem that I've noticed, but it's actual output of page elements to the screen is poor in comparison to Gecko. It doesn't comply with W3C standards... I hope IE7 will fix this! - Pita

getData/setData improvement (clipboardData)

The methods getData/setData of clipboardData should support CF-HTML as data format -- Konni

How on earth does script have access to the clipboard? Is this another propriatary extension IE has added? I've never heard of such an awful thing. -- Lachlan Hunt

SVG with support for events. Additionally work with W3c to add an event for drag and drop handling. SVG with events and Drag and Drop will give us the baseline tools for a new generation of interactivitly and integration of websites and applications.

Goto URL Function

What's about this nice function which you can find in other browser called "GoTo URL"... Mark an url which your mouse, press the right mousebutton and choose "GoTo URL" and the browser jumps to the selected URL. That would be nice too!

Better yet, implement a feature like Mozilla has, and allow any arbitary text to be selected and dragged. When it's dragged to the tab-bar or address bar it determines if it is a URI and goes to it. It may also be useful, when looking at text files (such as RFCs, or whatever), to add the option to automatically parse the text looking for anything that can be interpreted as a URI and convert it to a hyperlink. Just like in plain text emails. This should not happen by default, some people may get upset if IE was automatically modifying their documents. There could, however, be an option for the user to decide to do this via a menu option or toolbar button, or automatically when opening certain file types (the default should be to only do it when the user specifically requests through a menu/button) -- Lachlan Hunt

You can already get some of this feature in IE. http://www.unixdaemon.net/ie_plugins.html#opentext has a plugin that does just this -- DeanW

Drag a link 1mm in any direction to open it in a new tab, like FireFox and MyIE2. Hugely useful when browsing large collections of links.

History And Addressbar Stuff

I would like to be able to lock the addressbar displaying all my visited pages while I type. The Adress bar should provide only those addresses that I once typed in there (as seen in Mozilla). I don't understand why I would wanna see a trillion http://www.google.at/search?hl=de&ie=UTF8&q=blabla&meta= links in my adresses anyway...!?
Another thing is the history. I would like to turn off the history but still keep the visited links of the last couple of weeks. A little button to turn off the history log function that would do.
These two features are quite nice to have on a PC that is beeing used by many people. -- mud

Viewing History By Order Visited Today could be friendlier. At the moment, when the clock hits midnight, the history list in this view is reset to blank. Not very helpful. Why not let this view be for the last 24 hours, rather than for the current day. This would resolve the issue. --Smiling Crow

Ideally, there ought to be no 24 hour limit --Innes

'History Filtering'

(From Firefox) A 'filter' textbox at the top of the history list, which restricts what items are displayed to only those that contain the filter text.
Useful for example, when you remember reading a PDF but cant remember where or what it was called. You type 'pdf' into the history filter and the history list collapses to a list of pdf files (or urls with 'pdf' in them). I just noticed IE has a similar feature that requires more clicking and is less 'immediate' in that you have to perform a search rather than watch the results alter as you type. --Innes

HTML editing: Editing Tables

the html editing feature was a great add-on. But I miss some more editing support for tables: resizing columns/lines with mouse, for example. If users are used to the behavior of table editing of frontpage or word, they miss this behavior in editable html content in IE. Mozilla had got some improvements regarding table editing... ;-) -- Konni

NO!!! DO NOT extend html outside of a standards organisation, or at least do it through collaboration with other browser vendors like the WHAT WG (Web Hyper Text Application Technology Working Group) is doing. -- Lachlan Hunt

Umm - Isn't editing HTML completely separate from HTML standards ? As long as the editor supports and encourages, (or even enforces) standards, why not ? -- Only Me

HTML editing: DEC Features

The further development of the dhtml (NOTE: There is no such thing as DHTML! this is a proprietary term that MS introduced to describe it's combination of HTML, CSS, and JScript which are 3 seperate technologies -- Lachan) editing control has been stopped a couple of years ago. But there are still some features, which only the DEC has, which are not available when using contentEditable/designMode. The html editing provided by contentEditable/designMode should offer the same (or, better, more) features like the DEC. This would ease the replacement of the DEC in IE based editing solutions. -- Konni

Hyperlinks : Preventing multiple clicks

I know it's been like this for a while, but is there any reason why IE should support a second click (or third click etc.) on a link ? I run a busy ASP intranet (50 hits/sec) and find that there is a vicious feedback mechanism when page load times exceed 5 seconds: Users tend to click the same link again after 4 seconds, wait 4 seconds and click again, wait 4 seconds and click again, wait 4 seconds and click again, wait 4 seconds and click again ... each time, the server starts handling the new request afresh. The poor frustrated user only gets the page when he gets tired of clicking and gives up ! I have found two ways of handling this using the onclick event : if(document.readyState!='complete'){return(false)} -- or -- onclick set the onclick handler to return(false). The former doesn't work in IE 5. The latter is not nice to target="_blank". I loop through document.getElementsByTagName("A"). Is there any reason why the browser itself can't ignore repeat clicks by default ? I have left the 'Stop' option, or the ability to click on a different link : repeat clicks only seem to be destructive, and double-clicks are common - I am surprised my logs only show 15-20% reduction in traffic, but it is very effective just when the server needs it most !-- Only Me

Immediate Typing After Ctrl-T

Currently, one cannot type immediately after opening a new tab with Ctrl-T. Instead, one has to wait until the tab has initialized. This should really be changed, as it degrades browsing performance. (Opera and Maxthon do this alright, IIRC.) --FabianSchmied

International Domain Names (IDN)

Currently IE does not support the ability to navigate to domain names which use characters beyond the standard LDH conventions in ASCII. A plug-in from Verisign called i-Nav is required. Native support for IDNs now exist in Opera, Safari and Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape browsers. Clearly adding support within IE would be desireable so that users do not need to download and install a plug-in. Open source SDKs which fall under BSD licensing guidelines are available (including C libraries from Verisign) which implement the IDNA standards (RFC 3454, 3490, 3491, and 3492). Over 29 TLD registries worldwide now offer the support to register domain names in languages/characters other than english/ASCII.

> Native support for IDN was added to IE7 last year. For IE6, there are many free plugins.

Image Resizing

Currently IE renders images with box filtering (point-sampled). That means that an image that contains text will be rendered unreadable unless the image is rendered no smaller than the original, or unless it's rendered at exactly 2x, 3x, and so on. This hits a lot of different sites (including many of Microsoft's MSDN and DDK doc sites), before the document designers realize that IE constrains them to work this way. The workaround, unfortunately, means that you can't have diagrams that naturally scale to the user's desired text size, one of the coolest features of IE.

The solution to this is simple and (with today's hardware) cheap. Filter images that are rendered smaller or larger than native resolution. This decouples the native resolution of an image from its employment in a web page.

One thing I hate and that DOESN'T have to do with the algorithms but still with the resizing: you have to move you mouse off (really annoying) and wait a few seconds for the little box int he lower right to pop up. Firefox's method is better; it's always on, can click anywhere on the image, and it even lets you resize as you load the image. --infrared

> Fixed for IE7 Beta3.

If Microsoft decides to do filtering on images, it should be disabled for small images because trying to filter spacer GIFs and tiling backgrounds would slow down rendering. --mkol

Import and Export

Add the ability to import and export:

* RSS feeds via OPML
* List of favorites via OPML
* List of sites for the various security levels
* List of sites for cookies allowed / blocked

---

Intra site links a different colour

Every 4 years, there is an international conference - the World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE). A paper this year was about learners "getting lost" following links on the Internet. The teacher would tell them to go to abc.com, and before you knew it the kids were off and lost clicking on every irrelevant link they found on the site.
The solution was incredibly simple, and we all had a "d'oh!" moment - all we have to do is convince you how easy (and necessary) it is.
We are all used to links being underlined in blue. Why not have (as an option) the ability to have "intra-site" links underlined in a different colour? Thus, the teacher can tell the kids to go to abc.com, and only click the red links. That way, the learners will at least stay within the intended site!
The principle is so mind-blowingly simple, yet - as the IT Director of a massive K12 school (2500 learners) I know just how much difference it would make. 600 delegates from all over the world listened to this Frenchman, and all applauded. It is such a simple solution to a huge problem.
Discerning an "intra-site" link would not be difficult (no site specifier on a link, or the same site at "this" page) but would not be fool-proof (alias site names, IP addresses used in links, etc) - that's just tough. Mot of the time, it would be great!

Integration with Strider HoneyMonkey

PDF describing the system is at ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2005-72.pdf

Being able to have the browser subscribe to and frequently update a list of exploit URLs to avoid (optionally, of course) would go far toward quarantining these systems until they're cleansed. A system could periodically verify a flagged URL until the exploit is removed.

This would be more useful if provided as a shared service of MS and other major search sites (MSN, Yahoo, Google, Amazon), and if the information were available to (cough) third-party browsers.

Even more useful would be OS integration with the data, but that's a different product.

IP Filtering

How about setting a default behaviour of IE to NOT allow the user to visit any web site by IP address that's outside of their local subnet? This would prevent a large portion of phishing sites from getting browsed. Of course, web developers would need an override, but this should definitely be a default. -- bjackson617

IPv6

IE will apparently (in 2K3 and XP) work if a domain name resolves to an IPv6 address. What it won't let you do is put in a colon-hexadecimal address. It should. One hopes that IPv6 is the future, and things like browsers shouldn't stand in its way. IPv6 addresses are certainly horrible to type in, but for diagnostic purposes they're essential. When a domain name has both an A and AAAA record, it would be nice to be able to pick which one is used.

> IPv6 Literals support was added for IE7 Beta2.

Input type=file improvements

* add suboption (attribute) multiple=true|false allowing multiple file upload
* add suboption folderselection=true|false allowing selection of complete folders (addition to suboption multiple)
* add suboption maxsinglefilesize allowing to set limit for the size of files being uploaded, to be checked before the upload starts
* add suboption maxcompletefilesize allowing to set limit for the size of all files, to be checked before the upload starts
* add suboption allowedextensions to set file extensions; than only files with this extension should be selectable

When offering multiple file selection IE should offer an option for using index postfixes at the upload. For example, using input type=file name=myname, and selecting 4 files, the request should then use the names myname1, myname2, myname3, myname4. This should be optional! -- Konni

Absolutely NOT!!! DO NOT do this under any circumstances, unless these additions are discussed in an open forum and in collaboration with other user agent vendors. If you think these options are worth considering for standardisation, discuss them with the WHAT WG. W3C are no longer using <input> elements for new versions of XHTML — they've upgraded to XForms, so <input> will not be extended there, unless the WHAT WG's specifications are accepted. There are also severe problems with your suggestions:
* multiple=true|false
* That is not the correct way to do boolean attributes in HTML/SGML or XML. The correct way is to duplicate the attribute name as the value. eg. @multiple="multiple"@. I believe something like this was suggested for the WHAT WG's Web Forms 2.0, but it doesn't seem to be there. Feel free to search the archives there, and send any suggestions to them for this.
* folderselection=true|false
* This is completely redndant. The method a user is able to select multiple files is outside the scope of the mark up. If a user agent wishes to provide this option, then they can, but the mark up should not specify any presentational or user interface features.
* maxsinglefilesize
* maxcompletefilesize
* See the min#min and max#max attributes in Web Forms 2.0.
* allowedextensions
* The file extension does not determine the file type in all circumstances, although it is used by Windows in that fashion. This should be implemented as an attribute that allows a list of MIME types, such as image/*, text/html, application/xhtml+xml, etc... See the accept#accept attribute in Web Forms 2.0
--Lachlan Hunt

javascript:window.printPreview()

The function should call the print preview like the IE menu does. The current workaround with the call to the IE activex control was fine for IE 5.0. But with the recent security enhancements it works now only for trusted sites.

JavaScript/VBScript compression (BZIP, et al.)

JavaScript/VBScript should support a range of compression methods. Preferably allowing for passwording within the content string. As Web Services etc... become more prevalent, more advanced coding needs to take place within the javascript. This is one of the many advances that would help (real XML support would be a good idea too).

JavaScript/ECMAScript (ECMA-262)

* Fully implement the ECMA-262 specification, and lose the name JScript. Call it JavaScript, and get rid of any proprietary extensions that are associated only with JScript.
* security issues with active content need to be adressed before tweaking is done.
* besides blocking popup windows, users should be able to control whether JavaScripts can move the window, hide crucial elements such as the status bar, resize windows, or other annoying things.

> That was fixed in XPSP2.

* always enable right mouse button
* Add the following Options, and have them disabled by default. Allow script to:
* Move or Resize Windows
* Raise of Lower Windows
* Disable or Replace Context Menus
* Hide the status bar
* Change images (rollover — this one can be allowed by default, but some may wish to prevent it)
* When a popup window is made (and not blocked by popup blocking) the user should be able to control whether or not it has things like the menu bar, status bar, toolbar, etc… even if the script initially made the window without them.
* Also, the script must not be able to prevent any popup window from being resized. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer before 5.01 ignored the resizable=no feature and allowed you to resize the new window. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;211068 Non-resizable windows can not serve the authors' best interests nor the users' best interests.
* If possible, give the user an option to open the content of any popup window within the current window or a new tab.
* Basically, JavaScript must not be able to control anything to do with the application user interface. It should only be able to work with the DOM. -- Lachlan Hunt

JavaScript Debugger

Add a JavaScript Debugger (something like Mozilla's Venkman debugger) to help developers work out exactly what IE is screwing up, and help them work out bugs in their own code.

Javascript Error Messages

The line # / character position returned in script error messages by IE rarely matchs their actual positions in the code. They only seem to align when no external script files are used. This seems to be becuase IE is returning values from some internal representation that does not match the input code. This should be corrected to return the file the error occurs in, and a position value that actually matches the position in that file.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I think this is the most major shortcoming of IE. I wouldn't be as dissatisfied with IE if it wasn't for this. Despite IE not having been updated for however many years now, I can say that the essential developer and user experience with IE is quite satisfying, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the JavaScript debugging functionality, which has pretty much been useless all along. If it wasn't for this, I wouldn't need to have Mozilla on my system to debug my JavaScript code. -- ptooey

JavaScript Freeing Memory

As a developer of mostly IE only, single page web applications, a major source of complexity I face is limiting the number of HTML elements that I create dynamically. It would be very useful to be able to pass in a no longer used HTML element (or element tree) and have all of the memory returned to the system. I often watch the Task Manager in horror and have to make my work unnecessarlily complicated to reduce memory consumption. -- Adam

Firstly, Adam, you need to get out of the habbit of writing IE only web applications. The web is designed to be an interoperable place that can work with any user agent on any web enabled device, and MUST (despite any of Microsoft apparent intentions in the past) be kept that way! Also, from what your talking about, it seems that you should probably be using the standardised DOM and then your free to add and remove elements and attributes however you like, and anything you want cleared from memory, you can do by simply clearing the variable and then the memory should be picked up by garbage collection.

From Adam: I am using the standard DOM and garbage collection often fails to work, or won't work until the page unloads. My feature request would to be able to explicitly free memory on demand from JavaScript. I think this would be a great feature to standardize too.

> Adam, perhaps you could try the "purge" function mentioned by Douglas Crockford on his website. - Will

JPEG 2000 support

JPEG 2000 (.JP2 extension) format allows better quality than JPG at the same filesize.

Keyboard Navigation Improvements

* Function Key Support - The goal is to support the function keys in a web form based application. It should be possible to trap a function key press event and then cancel the default action of the IE. I think that the IE (the frame application) should assist the content (the real application). The IE functions should of course stay available via menus.
* this has huge potential for abuse. think of the right mouse button. it shoudn't be implemeted or at least disabled by default. --SV
* Keyboard navigation within page like google labs
* Pressing Shift-F10 toggles "keyboard navigation" and disables all html-coded navigation controls including Alt+ combinations for e.g. F opens find box
* When a link has focus, pressing N highlights the next link in the tab order
* Pressing Ctrl+0 activates line-select mode where one can select text without the hassle of previous or next text getting selected too
* Single key for copying to clipboard the current URL (if required along with the currently selected text or image)
* use left and right key arrows to navigate back and forward betweenpages, we can go up and down on a page, now lets goback and forth
* shift key to jump to other open ie windows, instead of having to mouse to the navigation bar

Links bar

The Links bar should work like the menu in each window (File, Edit, View...). Means: Folders in the Links bar should pop open if clicked once, and then also when hovering over another folder with the mousepointer. Right now, when you click one folder in the Links bar toolbar, you need two clicks to open another one right if the first one is still open. Also, those nice little private website-icons should'nt disapear after like 3 days. Managing the Links bar needs to get easier, too. The "Organize Favorites" window works pretty bad. -- mud

Links bar improvement required

The links icons are spaced too far apart and instead of having 14 links I now only have 7.
Also middle button click/scroll wheel clicking on a link icon does not open in new tab.
Tabbed windows this is great, and I think this can be improved further if you were to add an exit 'X' at the top left of each tab to close individual tabs I know there is a 'X' top left to close all tabs.
The layout seems a bit strange with the menus below the tabs, instead of at the top, and the address bar and back/forward keys cannot be moved they stay fixed at the top. ---knappers

Link/Site Navigation Menu

IE should support the ""(X)HTML"" @<link/>@ elements and be able to list all linked resources, such as the Next, Previous, Start, Contents, and any thing else listed in the Link Types section of the HTML4 and XHTML Modularization specifications. This could be impelemented similar to the way Mozilla 1.x, Seamoney 1.x and Firefox 1.x implements it. -- Lachlan Hunt
So far, Mozilla 1.x, Seamonkey 1.x, Firefox 1.x, NS 7.x, Opera 7, ICab 2, Lynx 2.8.x and a bunch of other browsers support HTML 2.0 <link> element. <link> is recommended by usability gurus (J. Nielsen).

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/use-links
http://www.subotnik.net/html/link.html.en
http://webcoder.info/reference/LinkBars.html
--DU/GT

Listbox Behavior and Positioning on Layer

We all know, that listbox objects are allways on top of everything. That's annoying, particularly if you are want to use them on layers. So, why don't give the developers the change, to set an attribute for that?

IMHO this is just a bug in the rendering engine -- Jorrit

I want list boxes to be able to be positioned based on all the characters I type. If I have a list box of state names, I want "mas" to position me to massachusetts not some state starting with the letter "s". - pcause

Mediabar Enhancements

The IE6 Mediabar is sometimes a bit useless - It would be very nice, if you could use it for playing and selecting files from "My Music"-folders while you're browsing the Web. That would be some kind of "Killerapplication"

> MediaBar was removed.

Meta Refresh Disabling

There should be an easy-to-access option to disable meta refresh tags, to prevent pages continuously refreshing. The options should be something like:

* Never refresh if not redirecting (ie. no URL provided to refresh to)
* Never redirect (ie. a URL was provided)
* Alert before refreshing with ok and cancel buttons to allow or deny the refresh
* Alert before redirecting with ok and cancel button too.

This should be available in the options dialog, but it should also be available as either a button on the toolbar, in the contenxt menu or other easy location so it can be disabled quickly for the entire page, or a selected frame/iframe or embedded object.

There should also be an option in the menu for the user to select whether they want the page to refresh every n minutes, similar to Opera's menu for this.

DU/GT: Meta refresh setting is already available in security settings. Do:
Tools/Internet Options.../Security tab/select Internet and then Custom Level... button/Miscellaneous section/Allow META REFRESH has Disable and Enable radio buttons
Some sites over-rely on meta refresh.

MHTML Compilation Features

Internet Explorer is already the only major browser to have support for displaying and saving to MHTML (Multi-part HTML). However, in order for MHTML be more widely used, and for this support to be attractive, IE needs to have slightly more advanced features to compile and decompile these files.

Allow saving of multiple pages to one MHTML file. Currently, the 'Save as MHTML' function will only save a single page and its images to an MHTML file. You can try to put together multiple pages manually, but its really difficult and messy, and there are third party utilities, but none are very good. Internet Explorer needs some type of ability to put multiple pages into one MHTML file, allowing users to have the full benefits of MHTML as being an archival format. One third party utility accomplishes this function by having a recording mode, and putting every page visited during the time when its on be put in one MHTML file. However, a probably more feasible way to work the function into IE would be to have an option 'Add to MHTML'. The current page and its images would be added to an already existing MHTML file.

Allow decompiling MHTML back to individual pages. Another feature that would be useful would be a function to decompile an MHTML file back into individual separate files. This would add to its appeal as an archival format, and also make it easy to change around a file.

Allow live editing of MHTML content. Obviously, a very good tool would be something that allows editing of an MHTML's contents without decompiling this way. But it may not be something Microsoft would want to build into IE, so I wouldn't expect this feature. Still, it would be very nice! It's not like it would be something appropriate to FrontPage or some editor program, since its not about creating web pages, but archiving them, and not for site designers, but site visitors.

Allow preservation of relative links versus absolute. In order to be able to decompile MHTML back to individual pages in a useful way, a good thing would be to ensure the user has the ability to preserve relative links, and the ability to decompile into a folder structure; so that the original design of the web site can be preserved. This would add to the appeal of using it for archival.

Microsoft Web Site Update with Next IE

The Microsoft website needs an update very badly, and it should coincide with the next version of IE. It needs forums, support for user accounts (this website has it, but it's insufficient; think phpBB phpbb.com, but with support for page subscriptions, topic subscriptions, private messages, buddies select people to watch and be notified when tehy're online, or send them a private message, MULTIPLE THEMES, member groups, etc.). And get rid of the online newsgroups and integrate those into the forums, too. And forums for older stuff, and forums linked to from each page, with the master forums in one location (i.e. you go to the Office 2003 page, you get a link to the Office 2003 forum, click on it and it redirects you to microsoft.com/forums/viewforum.aspx?forumid=office2003 or something). While you're at it, live chat rooms would be nice. And a user portal, that shows you latest microsoft news, links to your options, new private message notification, Favorite links, links to your microsoft product support and download (and option to choose which microsoft products you own - even back to old DOS - in your profile), stuff like that. And it also needs a Microsoft Museum where you showcase and have archived all the old products you don't sell anymore, maybe make some of them available to download and/or open source.

Mistyped URLs Must Stay in the Address Bar

Currently, when searching from the address bar is allowed, mistyped URLs without leading protocol specifyer (e.g. www.mistypedurl.url) cause IE to forward the URL to the search engine, thus overwriting the text in the search bar. This means that for correcting the mistyped URL, one has to either retype everything or copy/paste the URL from the search field and then correct it. That's really annoying: just leave the mistyped URLs in the address bar. --FabianSchmied

MNG support

There should be support for the MNG picture format in Internet Explorer.
The format is basically PNG with animation capabilities, hence the name Multiple-image Network Graphics.
It's not very wide used yet, but have great potentials over GIF, since it's not limited to 256 colors.
MNG includes a number of interesting features:

* object or sprite-based approach to animation, with commands to move, copy and paste images (rather than replicate them as in GIF).
* nested loops for complex animations.
* way better compression than GIF animations .
* support for difference (or ``delta'') images for still better compression.
* integration of both PNG and JPEG-based (``JNG'') images .
* support for transparent JPEG images.
* low-complexity and very low-complexity subsets for simpler implementation.

There are more information about it at the MNG website.

More controls

Web designers do all sorts of strange things to make menus, treeviews etc. Give us controls that do this in the browser. They could include:
* Toolbar.
* Treeview
* Squarified list view

MikeGale

NO!!! DO NOT do this if it would mean adding propretary elements and attributes. If they are defined in a standard, go for it, but if not, and I don't think they are, don't even think about it!!! -- Lachlan Hunt

Mouse Cursor

Diplay different mouse cursors for links that open a new window and links which open in the same window.

Mouse Gestures

This feature of FF and Opera is so convenient that I cant resist switching to those browsers despite that I love the way IE correctly render pages. Makes browsing faster and easier. For example, drag a link up opens in a new tab (well, Window in IE, because of lack of tabs!)

This is an excellent IE plugin for this: http://www.codeproject.com/atl/MouseGestures.asp --Ericlaw

MSN Messenger and MSN Explorer

MSN Messenger should be more closely integrated with IE (Contacts like in MSN Explorer, etc), and IE should be made a little more like MSN Explorer.

Totally disagree - using open standards Messenger should be able to happily integrate with any browser. Locking apps together is what angered so many people in the first place. (Slite)

Multiple Versions of IE at the Same Time

There is a great existing hack for running multiple versions of

internetexplorerfeaturerequests