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Read Feeds with Ease in Beta 3

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IE7 Beta 3 is here!  We’ve snuck in some goodies in the feed reading user experience based on your Beta 2 feedback (keep the comments coming!).  We are feature-complete for feed reading  in IE7, but we’re still looking for feedback to make tweaks and fixes for the final release.  If you run into issues with Beta 3, don’t hesitate in sending us your feedback.  Here are some of improvements since Beta 3.

 

Refresh All Feeds – Throughout the day, the download engine is refreshing your feeds.  However, when you’re ready to plow through all of your feeds, you probably want to make sure all of your feeds have the absolute latest info. This is feedback we’ve gotten from several beta users:

Airex: Nice Feature, but how can I, for example, refresh all subscriptions in OneClick?

TravisP: The feeds section definitely requires a sync or refresh function for the entire tree. I have over 50 feeds in my tree that requires each one to be right clicked on and refreshed.

Gert Van Waelvelde: I think a "check all feeds now" button would be very useful. When I turn on my computer I like to get all the latest news and latest blog posts immediately, rather than having to wait until the feeds are synchronized automatically. Also, when I'm about to turn my computer off, I like to know whether there are any new news items or blog posts that I should read urgently. A "check all feeds now" button would make this possible.

We’ve added a way for you to refresh all the feeds from the context menu from any feed or folder in the Feed List Pane.

 

Control Marking a Feed as Read – The feed reading model in IE is light-weight, and when you select a feed to read, the entire feed is automatically marked as read.  However, there’s a case where you open up a feed to read and realize that you don’t have time to finish reading all the unread items.  Wouldn’t it be nice to save the current feed reading state?

Roger Bonine: There doesn't seem to be any way to set read/unread info, either at the individual post level or the feed level. For instance, if I look at a feed and it only has two posts, I may scroll through the feed and read them both. Then I would mark the entire feed as read. Is this really not possible, or am I missing something?

Matt Ellis: I think the viewed model makes sense for the IE user - it's the least interaction, and it's the majority case that the user will want to mark all items as read when they view the page. The problem arises when I use the common feed from a more traditional aggregator where I have more fine grained control over my feed items. If I happen to browse to my feed in IE, IE will trounce over all my settings in my aggregator.

Now you can.   We’ve made 2 improvements to control how you mark a feed as read.  For feeds that have unread items, there’s a new control that appears “Mark feed as read.” 

If a feed has this control checked, when you navigate away from the feed (open a new link within the same tab, close the tab, etc.) the feed is marked as read.  To keep the current feed items in the unread state, just uncheck this control.

If you prefer to keep to manage when to mark a feed as read, you can change the default setting of this control through the Feed Settings dialog (Tools | Internet Options > Content > Feed Settings button) so that the “Mark feed as read” control is always unchecked.

 

Keyboard Shortcuts – In the past, we haven’t made it very easy to discover the keyboards shortcuts.  Aaron’s posted some useful keyboard shortcuts for IE7, and we’ve added them in the tooltip for the top-level buttons on the frame in Beta 3.  Here are the ones that we’ve added for Feed Reading:

  • Alt + J for Feed Discovery Button – Opens the menu of the discovered feeds on a webpage
  • Ctrl + J for Feed List Pane – Opens the Feed List Pane in the Favorites Center in a menu mode
  • Ctrl + Shift + J for Feed List Pane – Opens the Feed List Pane in the Favorites Center in the docked mode
  • Alt + S for Text Search – Puts the focus in the search box in the Feed Reading View
  • Alt + I for All Items – Displays all of the feed items in the Feed Reading View
  • Alt + M for Mark as Read – Toggles the Mark as Read control in the Feed Reading View

Here’s a pattern to go through all of your unread feeds:

  1. Ctrl + J to open the Feed List Pane
  2. Down arrow to find the next unread feed (a feed is bolded if there are unread items),  Right arrow to expand a folder, and Enter to select a feed to read
  3. Space to scroll through the feed to the end.  By default, we filter the Feed Reading View to unread items unless it is a list feed.
  4. Repeat steps 1 & 2 to get to the next unread feed

We hope you enjoy these improvements!   We look forward to hearing what you think.

- Jane

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Good Job :)

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    I was hoping to see a context menu item for a folder reading something like, "Open Unread in Tab Group".

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Very fine, indeed. But I was hoping to be able to customize a sound when feeds are updated,
    not only to get one when a feed is discovered in a page.
    Regards.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Great news, guys.  Now you just need to make the attachment downloading usable so that if i subscribe to channel 9 when at home on an ADSL link (have you ever tried doing that.. from home?), it doesn't try to download every single video.  Since you use BITS (a good thing), the downloads are all round robin'd meaning that it takes forever to actually get the most recent attachment down because it is downloading so many old enclosures at the same time.  Until you fix this, attachment support is unusable for any real-world purpose.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    What about the Comment RSS API support? Will IE7 RSS support, include it?

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    How do you get folders into the feeds list??

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Never mind! :-)

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    sounds good but I noticed that IE7+ was missing from the version list. Is there a rough ETA for that build? (Sort of gotten used to vista fairly quickly and seem to be doing more browsing on the  developement machine than on XP ....)

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Would like a more compact way to view RSS titles, maybe with one title per pulldown menu item similar to FrF*x.  Current layout of RSS entries takes up too much room.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Your screenshots show that I can create Folders in the Feed panel, just like Favorites.

    How can I do that?

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    Am I bad, just re-read blog and found feed settings via I O, Content. Strike last two lines of previous comment!

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    I installed beta 2 and couldn't get automatic update to work.  I then installed beta 3.  It still didn't work.  I removed ie7 and just installed beta 3.  After I did this, I got a message wen I manually updated the feeds saying that the feeds weren't being updated automatically because automatic updates weren't turned on.  There was a link to turned them on which I clicked on.  This message came up even though, I have the checkbox checked to update the feeds automatically by default every 15 minutes.  The feeds still aren't updating automatically.   Can I do anything to solve the problem.  thanks very much for the feed rader.

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    I love the new changes to the RSS feeds, but is it possible for you to implement RSS feeds with DTDs?  I've noticed that these feeds can't be taken by IE7.  Thank you!!!

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    The Refresh All feature is very nice and what I was looking for in the last beta.  What would make it even better is if it was part of the Feeds button, just like History.  Pressing the button would go to the feeds like normal, but pressing the dropdown would have the Refresh All feature and maybe Options.

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2006
    I just authored IEFeedManager (http://www.wintoolzone.com/showpage.aspx?url=clickonce/iefeedmanager) that uses the RSS API to have a feed management system outside IE - with a built-in RSS reader. It has the RefreshAll, Set Refresh Interval for all feeds (or a group), etc.

    The APIs were quite useful in getting this done. However - do you plan to come with API to pull comments for a Feed Item?

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2006
    IE7 Beta 3 crashed 3/3 times when adding RSS feed from NY Times.  Feeds were added and available when I restarted IE.  Minor inconvenience, but need fix.  

    RSS feeds that resulted in crashes were, International, Washington, and Technology.

    Index site is: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html?8qa

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Any chance that authenticated feeds will be supported in the near future?

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Response to: James Clarke

    The RSS Platform enables individual enclosure downloads.  However, the IE user experience is built around being a light-weight reader with no individual item-level support.  Hence, we don't provide individual enclosure level support in this release.

    - Jane [MSFT]

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Response to: thenonhacker

    To create folders within the Feed List Pane, you can either create the folder at the time that you subscribe (there is a "New Folder" button available on the Subscribe dialog) or you can create a folder by right-click context menu on any feed.

    - Jane [MSFT]

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Response to: norman may

    Hey norman, can you report this problem on the our feedback site?  Here are the steps to do it: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/24/560095.aspx

    This gets the bug directly to the product team and you can check the status of it.

    - Jane [MSFT]

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Response to: Gaurav Khanna

    Wow - this is an awesome tool! Just showed some devs on the feature team, and we all smiled.

    In regards to the comment support - we don't have this in IE7 today.

    - Jane [MSFT]

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Response to: Stuart Edick

    I'm not seeing this happen, but you may want to add this to the IE7 feedback site to get it directly to the developers to check it out.  Here are the steps: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/24/560095.aspx

    - Jane [MSFT]

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2006
    Please add a feature to sync the "readunread state" of posts between IE 7 and Outlook 2007. It is a big pain to read posts in one app only to find them unread in another. If you're going to sync them, then really sync them! :)

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2006
    IE7, breaks xsl transforms, even the Microsoft RSS feeds look wrong in IE7.  They work in IE6, xsl is great technology, it would be a shame to lose support for it now.

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2006
    Can we have an indicator on the tool bar that tell us that there are new (unread) feeds? Maybe change the Favorites Center star from yellow to RSS orange? That way we would know immediately that a feed has been updated and can check without having to remember to open the Favorites center every so often to look for feeds that are "bold".

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2006
    Can we have an indicator on the tool bar that tell us that there are new (unread) feeds? Maybe change the Favorites Center star from yellow to RSS orange? That way we would know immediately that a feed has been updated and can check without having to remember to open the Favorites center every so often to look for feeds that are "bold".

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2006
    I don't like how IE7 handles feeds. Problem is that you cannot mark a single article in a feed as read. So you subscribe to a feed with 40 msg, you read one article, and the whole feed is marked as read. This doesn't sound right to me.

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2006
    the tool is so terrible!

  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2006
    What about aggreagating content? If I have a folder of RSS feeds clicking on the folder should show an aggregated view of each.  I don't want to have to click on each RSS feed for each blog.

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2006
    Was the bug site disabled?  I'd like to post one and I always get a Page Not Found error at https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=136

    The problem I'm having is with my feeds not auto-updating.  I've turned off and back on the auto-updating but that's not solving anything.  I have to manually refresh each one, or refresh all to get them to update.

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2006
    Is there anyway to copy my feeds list from my work machine to my home nachine?

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2006
    As a matter of fact, there is. We just posted recently on how to do this. See this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2006/10/08/Saving-and-loading-feed-lists-in-IE7-using-OPML.aspx

  • Anonymous
    October 12, 2006
    Has anyone else got the problem whereby the Feeds Engine in C# never indicates the name of the folders.  In each case a blank string is returned as the name. I am using IE7 RC1, any thoughts?

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2006
    As newcomer to feeds, I noticed two things that made it difficult to begin using feeds in IE7:

  1.  There should be an "Organize Feeds" option under the Favorites tab.  This would make it much easier to create folders, move feeds between them, and organize folders (as opposed to now where they can only be sorted by alphabetical order).
  2.  I regret the loss of the ability to save whole websites and their links for offline viewing.  While I understand the utility of feeds I would have liked that function preserved.

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2006
    Ok, this feed not updating thing HAS to be fixed now!! I am not the only one with the problem.

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2006
    Is there a way to change the shortcut or disabled it?. I work with Peoplesoft and Control +  J is a shortcut that i used frequently. it does still work but it open the feed window and it is kind of anoying. thank you

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    > I am using IE7 RC1, any thoughts?

  1.  There should be an "Organize Feeds" option under the Favorites tab.  This would make it much easier to create folders, move feeds between them, and organize folders (as opposed to now where they can only be sorted by alphabetical order). Are You shure about this? I can't see it. May be there is some ruse?
  • Jane [MSFT]