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

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

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

You may be asking what RSS is. It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a way for web site publishers to publish information from their sites. The publisher creates a specially-formatted file on their web site that contains the most recent items (news stories, blog posts, etc.) from the site. This regularly updated file is called a “feed.” With an RSS reader (or aggregator), a user can subscribe to many feeds and read the new entries all in one place, without having to visiting individual Web sites to find out what’s new.

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

Discovering RSS feeds

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

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

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

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

Basic viewing of a web feed

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

Here’s a web feed before IE7:

Here’s IE 7 Beta 1:

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

- Jane

Published Tuesday, August 02, 2005 2:33 PM by ieblog

Filed under: General IE Information, Inside IE

Comments

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:36 PM by codemastr

we’re calling them “web feeds.” We’re still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds, so if you have any ideas or opinions, please post to comments.
-------

What about eNews Feeds, sounds a bit more creative than web feed!

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:41 PM by codemastr

I just clicked on the Feeds button for this very page. I chose RSS. It is displaying the ugly XML stuff, rather than the new formatted text. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:52 PM by David

Is it possible to create XSL stylesheets of our own?

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:55 PM by Stuart Frisby

A really novel idea might be to call them RSS feeds, the way they have been called now for some time.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 5:57 PM by Rosyna

Just call them RSS Feeds. I mean, that *is* what you're doing throughout your entire blog post, after all.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:01 PM by codemastr

A really novel idea might be to call them RSS feeds, the way they have been called now for some time.
------
Bad idea. As he said, they will be adding Atom support. Atom is a competitor to RSS. Imho, calling it RSS/Atom Feeds is just plain ugly.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:03 PM by kL

IMHO one of the most useful things in RSS is notification about new feed items. How do you implement this feature?

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:14 PM by Ian Kirker

Something like "Live Feeds" or "Live Content Feeds" would be typical.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:35 PM by Chump

How long before "Leveraged Really Simple Syndication" is thrust down our throats?

# RSS Features in IE 7

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:35 PM by Kevin Burton's Feed Blog

They're going to include support for auto-discovery and pretty printing of RSS feeds when viewing the XML.Safari does this now and NewsMonster did this before Safari. I wish they would publish some innovative new features here and not rehash what all the players already implement.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:36 PM by Kevin A. Burton

Could you post more detailed information please? All the other aggregators do RSS discovery and pretty printing. Post something innovative :)

http://www.feedblog.org/2005/08/rss_features_in.html

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:36 PM by AndyC

I get the RSS feed delivered as XML too, on both this site and Channel 9 - unless I look at the BBC RSS feed first. I'm not quite sure where to report it "officially" though, there isn't any info on the MSDN Subscriber Download site (unless I'm being blind)

As to the name, how about Channels? ;)

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:45 PM by Charlie Wood

Jane,

Does the current IE7 beta have support for the Simple List Extensions described at Gnomedex?

Thanks,
Charlie

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:48 PM by kevin

How does IE7's "easier-to-read" view interpret publisher-defined xsl? Does it override IE7's rendering? Is it ignored?

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:54 PM by Nicolas F.

Pardon me if I'm wrong, but all that buzz you make with "RSS In-te-gra-tion" is basically a one-hour work : just make a very simple XSLT page that transforms the RSS into a XHTML file. That is *really* simple.
I find it completely unprofessionnal trying to make a very simple XSLT file look like a great improvement. I mean come on, stop that already. You added a file.
People know that you did nothing, that these improvements are small. You screwed up this time, everybody talks bad on IE 7, I bet Firefox will truely benefit for such a bad quality work of yours.

Microsoft. Yesterday's technology, tomorrow.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:54 PM by Bobby Jack

I 'Third' Dave and Kevin: will xsl be supported? This is a vital function for future web progress and firefox is supporting xsl right now.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 6:58 PM by Bobby Jack

Sorry: "David" ;-)

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 7:15 PM by Mark El-Wakil

Here's a thought:

Store a Tree of Active Bookmarks (RSS feeds) in a window on the left (similar to how History looks).

Mouse over elements within the tree (stories, etc), and have the resulting Title / Description appear on the main window.

This way, it'd be really easy to peruse all the RSS feeds without having to click anything.

Just a thought.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 7:30 PM by James Hancock

Are we going to get a newspaper view of RSS feeds?

I.e. I want to take all of the subscribed RSS feeds and show them in date order (not grouped by Feed) at the beginning of the day. That way I can read it in the morning like a newspaper. There's a reason why newspapers are the way they are, and this is it. I fail to see the relivence of RSS if you're going to make people read them feed by feed. You might as well just use the syncrhonize function in IE 6 and just view all of the favourites that changed...

# RSS Features in IE7

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 7:34 PM by basement.org

The RSS Team at Microsoft provides a glimpse into the RSS features in IE7. In a nutshell (so far at least) it&rsquo;s autodiscovery (a feature that Firefox currently has) and a more readable view of a web feed (vs. the...

# Le RSS dans Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 version b

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 7:58 PM by Jean-Luc Raymond

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 8:08 PM by Faruk Ateş

I'm curious about two things:

1) how are you going to present this to the end-user, really? The sentence above (start of post) makes sense to people who develop on the web or work with the web actively, but most people (ordinary web-users) still have no clue what the heck "RSS" is, or what a "feed" is. "RSS feed" is also rather odd to focus on, now that Atom 1.0 is a full specification and is MUCH nicer to work with than RSS. It's good that support for Atom will come, at least, but why give it the name of the feed type that is outdated and is likely to be dropped? Much better name (imho) would be "Subscription feeds" -- indicates what it does, what it's for, and still uses the correct term: feed.

2) will IE7's feedview become a user-customizable feature? By web authors, too?

--
Faruk Ates
http://www.kurafire.net/

P.S. Nice job on the new look of the Blog, much less confusing with the comments, now. :-)

P.P.S. your comment form input fields have black text specified, but no background color -- for me, it's black on black in the inputs. The textarea is fine, though...

# what to call rss feeds?

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 8:14 PM by Maurits

Syndicated Content

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 8:28 PM by ro1

Tell me, have you actually implemented this in Beta 1 yet, or is it in a future update? I still see the raw unformatted page just like others have mentioned.

Anyway, I much prefer Live Bookmarks.

p.s. I just noticed the RSS feed for CNN works properly, but IEBlog doesn't.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 8:34 PM by Steve

Want to add more than just RSS? Add atom now!

http://scaleovenstove.blogspot.com/2005/08/hacking-ie7-feed-discovery-more-than.html

# IE7 Needs This Feature

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:17 PM by Anthony

I love the look, feel, and functionality of IE 7. I think you ought to add this though. The ability to open a link, that is within another program (i.e. an Outlook email message), in a new tab in the same IE7 session rather than opening a whole new instance of IE7.

Also all of us need to jump into this convo found at, http://forums.g4tv.com/messageview.cfm?catid=64&threadid=454007&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE=&STARTPAGE=1 . With these uneducated morons, IE7 will never bloom.

# Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:57 PM by Tom

KISS..."RSS Feeds"

Also, nice try with the blog makeover, but why waste half my widescreen(1440x900) laptop display with lines like 73-79 in your stylesheet

#container {
margin: 0px auto;
text-align:left;
padding: 0px;
width: 760px;
background-color: #333333;}

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:59 PM by Daniel

Why dont you just call them live bookmarks, thats what firefox calls them, and you pretty much stole the rest of the features from firefox... so why not take the name for these to?

# Feed Me

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 10:13 PM by Dave

"Web feeds" sounds good, has a nice ring to it. Anything "Live" would be a Firefox knockoff, and as you mentioned you will be supporting other formats in addition to RSS so you wouldn't want to call it that . They do look cute and nicely designed in IE7, though since I use Bloglines as an aggregator it doesn't really matter much to me.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 10:18 PM by RBL

Uhhhh ... why not call them "RSS Feeds" or just "Feeds"? Resist the marketingspeak urge to rename something that's already been named. That the kind of nonsense that gave us Firewire, i.Link, and 1394. All it does is confuse consumers.

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

Tuesday, August 02, 2005 10:23 PM by John

This is/will be a nice addition to IE...
But please make it simple for end-users to have feeds handled by their default aggregator, even if it's an application different than IE7...

# IE 7 will not include any ad-blocking technology.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:05 AM by Mike

Contrary to some rumors, IE 7 will not include any ad blocking technology.

I think Microsoft Internet explore's team should let the pop-up blocker that is included in IE6 SP2 to the new version of Internet Explorer 7

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:47 AM by LIFT

"Also, nice try with the blog makeover, but why waste half my widescreen(1440x900) laptop display with lines like 73-79 in your stylesheet "
--Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:57 PM by Tom--

Probably the same reason news papers and other print use columns ... You must be the only one that I know of that enjoys reading lines of text that are about 1foot long. Just a thought ;) But then again to each their own.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:56 AM by Jeremy

I want to send a feed to my external reader. Can I do that?

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:59 AM by Jace

Please just use Web Feeds. It's fine and friendly for the web-illiterate.

Secondly, please allow them to be added to the Links section so that they can be set as a toolbar item, and the feed titles will drop down like in Firefox.

Thirdly, please allow for customizable updating of feeds, as in, refresh every 5 minutes, etc.

Fourthly, Please cause the icon or favicon, as the case may be, for a given Feed to light up in the menu under Favorites, or on the Links toolbar when updated Feed titles are received.

Thank you very much.

# [JRA-6686] Provide stylesheet for RSS search results

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 1:31 AM by JIRA: JIRA

Looks like Microsoft might make this unnecessary -- starting from IE7 they're now styling RSS content automatically.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280.aspx

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 1:53 AM by Foxtrot

I really appreciate that IE is finally getting an overhaul. I hope you'll continue work after this, of course, so that we get the whole "standards suite" at a later date: XML, XSL, SVG, XHTML, CSS, SMIL, RSS, Atom, etc. Now *that* would be fun web. ;-)

You may want to look into making RSS-feeds more distinguished from page content, though, to help users who might stumble upon the feature accidentally.

Nice site redesign. I think it's far better than the old design.

The Firefox nightlies integrated similar functionality recently, by the way, basically integrating the Feedview extension.

Keep it up! :-)

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:50 AM by Xepol

If you are only supporting RSS feeds, then call them what they are, RSS feeds. Microsoft's desire to CONSTANTLY rename things is annoying at best. (Go ahead, just ask me about Avalon's renaming, just ASK me if think presentation foundation is better name than Avalon, I DARE YOU!)

It was RSS long before MS got interested, and it will be RSS long after MS retasks the IE team and lets IE languish for another half decade or more. You can call it web feeds all you want, but you it won't help MS patent some absurd minor tweak to it.

However, if you are going to suppose multiple syndication feed standards such as atom, then just call them what I, and any reasonable individual would already - syndication feeds.

Please, stop trying to rename everything. Things already have names, and you insult everyone who invested blood sweat and tears into things when you blithely come along and rename it. Does you ask people their names and then tell them that the shall henceforth be named "bob" ?? No. MS is not a leader here, it is a follower, so please follow politely.

As for the stunning 2 hours of work already invested into supporting RSS feeds already, very pretty. I think that a product like RSS Bandit is already outside the scope of the IE team's mandate, so perhaps you should just integrate RSS Bandit and be done with it.

Ok, I'm grumpy today. Probably a headache coming on. Regardless, the core messsage holds true.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 4:14 AM by hAl

'Web feed' sounds fine to me. Covers the essence of what it does.

A 'web feed button on the toolbar lights up' but to be honest it could light up a bit more lively I think.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 4:26 AM by Richard

"web feeds" sounds good to me. I've always thought the various alternatives currently used (rss feed, atom feed, syndication feed, syndicated content, etc) are more than a little opaque and likely off-putting to the novice user.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 5:08 AM by John Evans

Why not call them "Pulls" to distinguish them from the "push" technology of email and newsletters.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 6:53 AM by macewan

I agree with Xepol. Again you're a late comer to the syndication feed game so try not to further alienate the tech crowd and use the name that's almost standard.

[rant]
Your feed icon looks very similar to the icon used in Firefox just as your msn spaces icon looks similar to the Ubuntu Linux logo.

see:
http://people.warp.es/~jorge/blog/?p=38
http://spaces.msn.com/members/spaceslogo/

It's insulting when you do this.
[/]

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 7:43 AM by forgetfoo

i just hope that i (and others) can add our own XSL "styles" for the web feed view ;)

would also be neat to have one of those "slider" widgets to auto-resize the feeds length in the browser, much like Safari and the Feedview FF extension -- comes in handy when reading full text feeds, esp. when there's 10-20 in a feed...

if i add a website to my Favorites, and it has an RSS feed, will there be an option to have it auto-saved/loaded with that bookmark?

when i search for something in IE7, might be nice to have the option to search my subscribed webfeeds... very handy when try'n to find or research something on the fly, y'know?

/just a few thoughts

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 8:26 AM by Anup

2 things:
1) If the RSS's XML document itself has an XSLT applied, IE 7 Beta 1 ignores it. I think that is bad. In fact it overrides behaviour available in IE 6 which simply treats it as an XML document.

You should apply your own XSLT when there isn't one there already.

I am referring to the xml-stylesheet prolog near the top of the XML document:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/xsl/rss.xsl"?>

2) Name: syndication feeds or web feeds gives it a more generic name (IF you are going to support more than just RSS, e.g. Atom.)

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 8:31 AM by Xepol

Macewan - Ya know, I run Ubuntu on my Mac, but I never noticed that. You are absolutely right - it is a clear rip off. (If MSN had been first, you'd better believe a lawsuit would have been filed!)

My head hurts a bit less and I'm less "irritable" now, but I still feel strongly that if you want to be a technology leader, you have to be first to the party. Renaming stuff after the fact doesn't fool anyone and just annoys/alienates people.

Stick with RSS Feed, or more broadly, a Syndication feed.

If MS wants to try to introduce their OWN feed standard, call that a webfeed, but since MS is hot and heavy for XML, I'm betting it would look just like RSS and Atom (which are already so close, the differences barely matter).

- Xepol

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 10:23 AM by Nils

"Web feeds" is too vague. It's like people who use "Internet" as a verb (e.g. "I'll Internet you some pictures"). We can say "e-mail" so why not call them what they are: RSS Feeds. I'm not opposed to eNews feeds or news feeds, as that captures a bit more of what they actually are.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 10:32 AM by Marc

I prefer "RSS Feeds" too - it's very confusing when Microsoft names features something different than what other products call it, and "Web Feeds" is really vague.

But if you decide not to call it "RSS Feeds", how about calling the feature "Syndicated Feeds"? That's still close enough that people who know what RSS is can figure it out, and it preserves the meaning.

# RSS Feeds in Toolbar?

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 10:42 AM by Haydur

Can we please get RSS feeds in drop-down menus similar to Live Bookmarks in Firefox. Please...?

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:02 PM by codemastr

Personally, I'd like the IE team to take a look at pluck (www.pluck.com) that's pretty much how I'd like RSS/Atom implemented in IE. It allows me to view all my feeds easily, get notified of new entries, etc.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:12 PM by Daniel E. Renfer

I prefer the name "Syndication Feeds" over the alternatives suggested. "RSS Feeds" is the standard right now, but won't be valid if/when Atom takes over. "Live Feeds" is Mozilla's term and you don't want to blatantly steal from Firefox any more than you are already. (plus it's a stupid term, IMHO) "Web Feeds" sounds good, but not every RSS/ATOM feed is going to be the syndicated content of a web page. People will start using feeds for more and more things, and tying them to the term "web" kinda limits what they really are.

Is IE7 going to use it's special formating features whenever I view an XML file in RSS/ATOM format, or only when I click on the (web|rss|live|syndication) feeds button? Will I be able to switch between the multiple views. I don't want to be testing the RSS output of my script and have to keep viewing source to see my raw XML.

# RSS Features in Internet Explorer 7

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:40 PM by Brandon's Vista

Jane Kim, Program Manager for RSS in Internet Explorer, made a really cool post at the IE Blog regarding...

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 12:47 PM by Venture Chronicles by Jeff Nolan

Link: RSS Features in IE 7 for XP and Windows Vista Beta 1. Hi! I’m Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer. Now that Beta 1 of IE 7 for Windows XP and Windows Vista are released, I

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:11 PM by Tom

LIFT wrote:
"Probably the same reason news papers and other print use columns ... "

This is the web. It is viewed through a wide variety of devices...cellphones, blackberrys, TVs, and widescreen laptops. Fixed width is shortsighted.

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:32 PM by LIFT

Tom wrote:
"This is the web. It is viewed through a wide variety of devices...cellphones, blackberrys, TVs, and widescreen laptops. Fixed width is shortsighted."

Tom, I understand your point. You should keep in mind that if developed properly there shouldn't be any problems. For example using different style sheets for different devices/screen sizes. Just a thought.

# Re:

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 3:11 PM by Aristotle Pagaltzis

What about simply “newsfeed”?

It’s an established name, describes the purpose passably, and is format-neutral.

It would be nice if not every organization felt the need to invent yet another term…

# IE7 security changes

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 6:07 PM by JD on MX

IE7 security changes: Rob Franco of Microsoft provides guidance on some of the security work being done in IE7. The first beta, now in private release, adds additional constraints on some uses of URLs and browser scripts. Rob also describes...

# Microsoft Blatantly Rips Off Firefox in IE Beta 1

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 6:59 PM by Sweet ~/ Chicago

I recently came across a post on Microsoft&#8217;s official Internet Explorer weblog about how they&#8217;re going to implement RSS feed support as Firefox has. Of course, they didn&#8217;t include the last three words of that sentence, but if you check...

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

Wednesday, August 03, 2005 9:32 PM by RQ

I'm really glad IE is moving forward with standards compliance. Thanks, guys!

I initially wanted to say "Just leave the name "RSS feeds"", but then i saw comments about Atom. So my current opinion would be - leave it as it is ("web feeds") or call it "newsfeeds". "Live feeds" would also be appropriate. Even though it would copy Firefox. So what? Please don't invent some cool new name which wouldn't even hint at current ones.

Also, some notes:
* how about feed://foo and/or feed:http://foo URL's? Safari seems to accept both of these, transforming the second case to feed://foo. The second one seems more technically correct for me though.
* what about view source? Will I get raw XML, or the generated HTML if I choose to view source? Safari seems to view HTML, but I'm not sure I like that behaviour...
* will the feedview be automatically displayed for all XML files, that would specify correct MIME in headers? I mean, what if I would just paste a link to some rss feed? IE should autodetect that and act accordingly.
* it would be cool if feeds would expand in favourites menu (like live bookmarks in FF). OTOH, RSS is quite useless unless you notify the user about new entries.

# Microsoft debuts RSS in IE7 Beta 1

Thursday, August 04, 2005 5:26 AM by Read/Write Web

Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer, has written a useful post detailing the new RSS features in IE7. A few comments from me... 1) Microsoft has decided to call RSS "web feeds", at least for now. Jane...

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

Thursday, August 04, 2005 6:10 AM by hAl

'Newsfeed' is already a known internet element describing de feed from and to newsservers. That is therefore useless.
Syndication feeds is too complex. Most people in the world do not understand the word 'syndication'. I certainly don't understand it (and can't be bothered to look it up).
Web feeds of Net feeds seems a reasonable choice for simplicity reasons.
Another option might be to replace feed with subscription and make it into Websubscriptions or Netsubscriptions.

I think also 'IE feeds' would be a nice choice. Even only to really piss off a lot of anoying people. Mayby put that one in beta 2 just to see the /. comments on it.

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

Friday, August 05, 2005 1:15 PM by Paul Kinlan

Will IE7 (and Longhorn) support the automatic finding of Feed links buried in a page. What I mean is, I have noticed that in the anchor "a" tag in HTML can support a "type" attribute, if this contained "application/rss+xml" would IE7 be able to use that as an indicator for a feed?

I would really like it if IE7 could discover feeds I have linked to (or another developer etc) somewhere on my page.

Obviously, you couldn't list all the feeds because you could easily spam the user with thousands of links, but you could provide the first 10 maybe? A lot of people, including most of the microsoft blogs, have post categories with the associated feeds; I would like to be alerted to via the feed button.

Sorry about the double posting of the links, they came out a bit rubbish in the previous post.
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/rss-feeds-that-dont-work-in-ie7.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/ie7-rss-feed-update-part-3-case-of.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/08/ie7-rss-feed-update-part-2.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/ie7-rss-feed-update.html
http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/07/ie7-suggestions-for-rss-feeds.html

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

Saturday, August 06, 2005 10:30 AM by Chris Quirke

First and only significant Q: Will you be applying your newly-found street smarts to suppress active content embedded in these feeds, or is it still "I expected the low risk of viewing data, but got attacked by the high risk of running code"?

Normally, I wouldn't even ask this, because I'd be highly pessimistic of the answer. But IE7 shows such an incredible and welcome catch-up on safety clue, that I now think it's worth asking :-)

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

Saturday, August 06, 2005 10:58 PM by Dan

Why do you folks always insist on changing everything. More different names will simply add to under confusion. Please, please stay with the term RSS.

(If you really want to, you could go with ActiveRSS or DirectRSS.)

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

Sunday, August 07, 2005 5:55 AM by Manish Jethani

"Web feeds" sounds good. Also, provide a way to import and export feeds in OPML format.

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

Sunday, August 07, 2005 8:10 AM by Hazelip

Why must Microsoft constantly dumb things down for their users? Why not take this as an opportunity to teach your users something instead of treating them like a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots who need little cartoon characters and cutesy names for everything?

You're selling software, not soft drinks.

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

Monday, August 08, 2005 8:22 AM by dDast

"We’re still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds."

Hows about "RSS feeds"?

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

Monday, August 08, 2005 12:48 PM by Andrew

"You may be asking what RSS is."

No, actually, I bet not a single one of your readers here was asking that!

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

Tuesday, August 09, 2005 12:33 PM by Lomedhi

PLEASE just call them 'RSS Feeds', like everyone else on the web does. Why create more confusion? I know you want it to be friendlier for newbies, but I think you would do them a disservice by introducing new terminology. Use tips and help text instead, like the "What is a web feed" item in your screenshot. Maybe there could be a notification the first time a feed is detected on a web page, allowing the user to get more information.

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

Tuesday, August 09, 2005 12:43 PM by Lomedhi

Further to my comment above, in order to be inclusive, I don't see a problem with calling them 'RSS and ATOM Feeds'. I prefer this to 'Syndication Feeds', because the terms 'RSS' and 'ATOM' are more commonly used elsewhere on the web. Again, there are plenty of opportunities and methods of explaining the terms to users who are unfamiliar with them.

# What's in a name - RSS or Feeds?

Tuesday, August 09, 2005 9:00 PM by Read/Write Web

Google News now has RSS feeds (finally!). It's great that all the big Internet companies now offer RSS feeds, but Google's move unfortunately signals a split in RSS branding amongst the big media and technology companies. Like Microsoft, Google isn't...

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

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 2:11 PM by Michael

To improve the readability of screenshots I would suggest to replace the jpeg format with png. Png does a much better job to represent text than jpeg and additionally has a smaller size then a jpeg with the same information.
Just my 5 cent ;-)

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

Friday, August 12, 2005 8:19 AM by guest

RSS feeds are not particularly known by the general Internet Public.
Plus the ones that use it, can use thir-party plug-ins to read feeds.
Better would be that bookmarks- favorites are joined automatically with RSS feeds (with an option to enable-disable eg).

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

Friday, August 12, 2005 9:59 PM by Sian Evans

What about Site Feeds?

# What's in a name?

Saturday, August 13, 2005 6:00 PM by Ed Bott - Windows (and Office) Expertise

Mike Torres spots a trend: Would anyone like a lesson in how FUD spreads in the blogosphere?&nbsp; Start here, then go here, here, here, and then finally here.&nbsp; When you are finished, email me a list of the people (with URLs) complaining they &quot;don't like the name RSS and propose...

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

Monday, August 15, 2005 5:23 AM by pholie

People, forget about IE. Use Opera, it has RSS feeds since long time ago, and many more. That's really innovative browser!
http://my.opera.com/pholie/affiliate/

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

Monday, August 15, 2005 6:38 PM by guest

I think that Microsoft is ridiculous. RSS Feeds have been around a long time, and you guys are not the first people to implement them. You should stop being arrogant, and just call them RSS Feeds, instead of renaming something you didn't come up with in the first place. It is really annoying and obnoxious. You should only name things that you come up with yourselves!

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

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 1:16 PM by Matthew Bonner

If there is a problem with calling RSS feeds RSS feeds because of Atom feeds why do you not bother to create a check or something which can tell the difference between the two feeds. I am sure it cannot be that hard and then you can call RSS feeds RSS feeds and Atom feeds Atom feeds.

Stop being awkward and reinventing things that you have not put any work into at all, that is a habit of yours isn't it and habits can be hard to overcome but it is about time you done your job properly. Most schools in the UK have chosen to ditch the next version of Windows in favour of a Linux operating system, I can see why when all the browsers on the Linux operating system can name such a simple thing correctly.

# Microsoft on the attack and under fire

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 9:03 AM by Mikey's blog

On the attack:

Apple loses iPod patent to Microsoft...
Microsoft Leveraging iPod Patent?
APPLE'S IPOD PATENT GAFFE
Under fire:
Playing name games
RSS or web feeds, original article on IEBlog

Much discussion going on about who invented what,

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

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 3:01 PM by guest

We’re still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds, so if you have any ideas or opinions, please post to comments.

relevant media

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There's an interesting debate occurring right now about the future of RSS and its accompanying terminology.&nbsp;...

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

Thursday, August 18, 2005 3:32 PM by TanNg

My wife could not figure out what RSS Feeds is. Web Feeds, Website Feeds or Site Feeds are easier to her.

And dont listen to those zelots, they will criticize everything you do.

# Syndication feeds should just work regardless of the name

Saturday, August 20, 2005 1:53 PM by YALD - Patrick Grote's Notes

In the past week, there's been a ton of conversations about what to call a syndication feed. This has focused on whether to call an RSS feed RSS, XML, feed or something else....

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

Monday, August 22, 2005 1:41 AM by M.H.

I was late to get on the bus this time and I still don't get whole things about "Web Feed" buzz, but, "RSS" name is always a source of troubles, especially when Dave Winer and his friend Robert Scoble would like to get in touch and want everything in their favorite shape. It is wise to avoid using "RSS" and choose other much easier-to-understand name.

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Back when Microsoft appeared to be clueless about RSS, I called on the software giant to come up with a desktop feed-reading client that was as easy to use as Outlook Express, its e-mail software. Microsoft eventually got the RSS...