Not having a copy of Windows to download IE8 onto, I have not yet had a chance to play with this new feature. However, in its current form my initial impression of it is not favourable.

The official line at Microsoft is that this is something that needs to be done as a start to highlighting potential phishing sites. While a laudable idea, I get something of a sense of cutting the nose off to spite the face.

First of all, it starts by assuming that all URLs are potential phishing sites. Does this include local URLs inside an intranet? What about addresses I have typed in myself?

As was noted in the user comments of the article, there are several well adopted URL structures that this feature does not work well with. Sub-domained sites, or sites using sub domain structured URLs as their main URL (such as del.icio.us) will be shown either incorrectly or incompletely. The only way the user will be able to see the entire domain is to move the mouse cursor over the Address Bar.

But the big bug bear for me is why do you have to obfuscate the rest of the URL information by default? No part of a URL is irrelevant, and information contained in URLs is becoming more and more relevant as time goes on (logically structured URLs, URL based identity management, etc). Why do I need to hold my mouse over the address bar to be able to see this? Surely there are better ways to emphasise the domain block of the URL? Embolden it. Change the colour of the domain, not the rest of the URL. Hypertext blue makes for good contrast against the black and white, why not use a scheme like that?

The idea is a good one, but the implementation could be better.

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An example of this occurs with Microsoft’s Office 2007 (at least in their Home and Student Edition, though I can’t imagine it being any different with any other). In this version, Microsoft updated the document formats to a new XML-derived specification. As a company well known for their efforts in backwards compatibility, in order to keep users not yet willing or able to adopt the new Office document formats satisfied the Office team decided to allow users to specify which document format should be used by default. By and large it works great.

However, this change of format doesn’t seem to effect the shell extensions installed, which allow a user to right click in a folder and create a new document. Those files are still created using the new format file. As it happens, this is my preferred method of creating documents as most often I find it more convenient than loading the application and navigating through the dialogue. My only problem is that it insists that it creates the documents in the new formats.

It might seem a small oversight (if it is indeed an oversight), but its one that regularly trips me up and that does hurt my experience with the application.

[tags]User Experience, Microsoft, Office 2007[/tags]

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