Getting IE7 To Recognise an RSS Feed

After loading the latest IE7 beta, I was stumped by it's inability to find the RSS feed on my blog page. I could see the nice big XML button - so what's up with that? It turns out, thanks to a great post on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog : Windows RSS Publisher's Guide (work-in-progress) I just needed to update the template for this blog and add a LINK tag to the header and all is well. For IE7 to "see" an RSS feed, the page has to have a LINK tag in the page header containing the details IE uses to present the RSS feed information. And thanks to QA's web guru Steve Mansell for pointing the solution to me as well! For more information on the LINK tag see this blog post.

IE7 Here We Come

It appears that MS is listening after all to the noise being generated by Fire Fox. As traffice to this blog shows, Firefox is making real inroads into IE's market share. The hit stats for this blog indicate over 35% usage of Firefox, with IE 6 at 58%.

Bill Gates is using the RSA Security show to announce a new version of IE. To be dubbed IE7, a beta is to be released this summer, with release "when the product is ready". IE7 is meant to be a major release focusing on security and usability. Security issues to be tackled in IE7 include phishing, malware, and spywaare. There is no news yet of precisely what will be in it, but from the demo I saw recently, browsers tabs do seem to be included! :-)