Lazycoder

IE7 looks and acts like Safari

Wow, I just watched the Channel 9 video of RSS in Longhorn and IE 7. One thing that struck me was how much IE 7 looks and behaves, at least in terms of RSS content, like Safari 2.0. Whenever I see similar applications from two different companies that behave in a similar manner, I wonder two things:

1) Who copied who?

2) Is there any real innovation happening or is that the best way to do things?

As far as the RSS related functionality goes, making the browser light up a little badge when there is a feed present makes sense. IE does it a little differently than Safari. I like the way that Safari does it mainly because the RSS icon isn’t always there. It only shows up in the address bar if a feed is present. IE 7′s RSS icon is omnipresent, just disabled or “greyed” (“Oranged”?) out when a feed isn’t present. IMO, it gets lost in all of the other Yahoo, ICQ, Office, and other icons that are stuck in the toolbar. I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on any of those icons.

The way the two browsers handle subscriptions is very similar, again there aren’t a whole lot of ways to skin that particular cat. It shows the “river of news” view of your subscriptions. Allows you to search your subscription, much like Spotlight and Safari do. Where the two browsers differ, and this is pretty significant to me. is how they handle external aggregators.

Safari allows you to designate an external aggregator. When you click on the RSS badge, it opens up the aggregator you have specified (in my case it’s NetNewsWire on my iBook) and lets the aggregator handle subscribing to the feed rather than the browser. IE 7, it appears from the video, allows aggregators access to the “common list”.

So my questions are:
1) Will I be able to designate a default aggregator. If I can, this will prevent the “extension grabbing” that happens a lot with documents.
2) Will the feeds be included in the Longhorn version of Spotlight? Being able to import the Feed details into the metadata store would be cool.

The other big difference between the two is that I’m watching a video of the IE 7/Longhorn RSS technology. If I want to see the Safari/Tiger RSS technology I just open up my iBook.