This morning Microsoft has released a public beta of version 7 of their Internet Explorer web browser, aimed at developers, although I’m sure a lot of tech-savvy and adventurous users will download and install it as well.
This release is significant for publishers who provide RSS 2.0 feeds for their content because this is the first Microsoft release that includes comprehensive support for RSS not only on the producing side, but also on the consuming side. Until now, Microsoft has not shipped an RSS reader, and now they have, for Windows XP, a operating system with many millions of users. Their aggregator, and the underlying platform, is likely to be used in very large volume, likely becoming the most-installed aggregator.
It’s also signficant in that Microsoft has been a staunch supporter of the “really simple” approach to syndication. Their aggregator, of course, has to support all the flavors of RSS that are out there, but they have worked closely with the community to be sure that they were correctly using the formats and protocols that are already in wide use. As we move forward, the target can get smaller, making it easier for all developers on all platforms, not just Windows, to support RSS. Because Microsoft is such a powerful force in the software business, this practice can’t help but influence others, in a positive way.
Further, the Microsoft offering includes support for RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures, making it a powerful engine for podcasting applications. This may create a diverse community of applications, far beyond the small number of “podcatcher” applications that are currently available.
Since I am primarily a Macintosh user these days, I have not installed the software myself, although Microsoft offered to let me try the software before its release. Even so, I am confident that they have done an excellent job of supporting RSS, and have added strength to the growing community of content providers and technology developers building on the format.
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by times on January 31, 2006 at 9:25 am
bah! download available to msdn subscribers only.
Posted by Dave Winer on January 31, 2006 at 9:37 am
That’s a bug, this release was supposed to be totally public, not just for MSDN subscribers.
Posted by th0m on January 31, 2006 at 9:49 am
What products *produce* RSS? Or do you mean just their online presense and blog service?
Posted by Dave Winer on January 31, 2006 at 9:52 am
Thom, that’s right and who knows there might be others, at some point.
Posted by Stephen on January 31, 2006 at 9:54 am
The site you point to Dave states Beta 1 and no dates on the page. Everything then goes to htto://www.microsoft.com/ie and there is only a link to Beta 1 at the bottom of the page.
I would be rather impressed if you came up with a public link for all of us IE peoples 🙂
Posted by Stephen on January 31, 2006 at 10:05 am
Scrub that the site is now updated and live 🙂
Posted by /pd on January 31, 2006 at 10:21 am
site is live. god features in it.
point to note : “In conjunction with Amazon’s A9 subsidiary, Microsoft submitted an updated version of the OpenSearch standard to the search and RSS communities, which was released under the Creative Commons license.’
Posted by /pd on January 31, 2006 at 10:25 am
Margeret Cobb, Group Program Manager of IE. Sez theres new cool stuff that is in the Beta. Vista users may have seen some of it already.
so vista tester maybe a little dissappointed :)-
Posted by kosso on January 31, 2006 at 11:01 am
I’ve been using the Beta1 for a while with no probs at all. Great to have the tabbed browsing in there.
‘Styling’ of RSS feeds is everywhere (and built-in). It’s like the RSS format becomes the page of content itself, rather than the data pointing to futher content.
So, full OPML support for IE8 then? 😉 Hmmm.
I also heard Microsoft are working on an ‘OPML Exchange Server’ – sounds interesting. Much use of SSE’s etc.
It’s going to be a busy year for data syndication, synchronisation and sharing!
Posted by kosso on January 31, 2006 at 11:02 am
Also, I noticed you run google analytics on this blog – are the results good/interesting/worthwhile?
Posted by Caleb on January 31, 2006 at 11:16 am
Won’t install on my machine 😦
Posted by appa » Blog Archive » IE 7 beta 2 available ! on January 31, 2006 at 11:27 am
[…] IE Blog has the announcement, as does Dave Winer in his Microsoft Ships RSS platform post. […]
Posted by Dr. Whitt on January 31, 2006 at 12:58 pm
<just-a-game>
I though the landing page looked like an old-school video game…
See if you can “grab” with your cursor the feature names as they marquee by and make them all stand still simultaneously!
Turns out it wasn’t a video game and became tiresome after about a minute.
</just-a-game>
Posted by Stuff » Blog Archive » Microsoft ships RSS platform on January 31, 2006 at 1:02 pm
[…] Microsoft ships RSS platform […]
Posted by scobleizer on January 31, 2006 at 1:18 pm
We have a video up on Channel 9 that explains more: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=159460
Posted by Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » While I was flying… on January 31, 2006 at 1:41 pm
[…] The Internet Explorer team released a new version which includes our new RSS platform. We posted a new video with the team up on Channel 9 (and that links to all the important stuff). Thanks Charles Torre for getting this up. Dave Winer promptly posted his thoughts. We were promptly Slashdotted. […]
Posted by Blogosopher » Blog Archive » A website without RSS is like a phone without a ringer on January 31, 2006 at 2:17 pm
[…] note: According to Dave Winer Microsoft just released a public beta of IE 7 which includes RSS support- so it may not be long for the rest of you. […]
Posted by super hanc petram » links for 2006-01-31 on January 31, 2006 at 3:26 pm
[…] Dave’s WordPress Blog » Microsoft ships RSS platform (tags: rss) […]
Posted by Hank on January 31, 2006 at 6:54 pm
I’m gonna go grab this right now….installed to a virtual machine of course 🙂
Posted by Innocent Bystander on January 31, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Now if they only had full support for html and CSS it might be worth running.
Posted by Zack Handley on January 31, 2006 at 7:38 pm
I am doing a multi day review of IE7 beta 2 on my site. zackwhandley.wordpress.com …I am a dyed in the wool firefox user (especially since performancing.com/firefox came out) but IF you are using IE, you owe it to yourself to ckeck this out. Strong resource (memory) management, fast loading and a promising aggregator…
I will be updating throughout the week …come note your experiences at my site…
Posted by ThePodcastNetwork :: G’day World » Blog Archive » Gday World #82 on January 31, 2006 at 9:05 pm
[…] Microsoft ships IE7 beta2 with RSS… but I can’t figure it out […]
Posted by Bob Morris » Blog Archive » IE 7 on January 31, 2006 at 9:12 pm
[…] Plus it has comprehensive support for RSS Explore posts in the same categories: RSS […]
Posted by Kevin Burton on February 1, 2006 at 12:42 am
This is a good reason to get a dedicated Windows machine… it’s a bit annoying actually.
Can’t wait to get my PowerMac Pro so I can run VMWare 😉
Kevin
Posted by Dasher on February 1, 2006 at 1:40 am
Once again Win XP x64 users are left out in the cold.
Posted by Make You Go Hmm: » Taking Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview through install and uninstall, step-by-step, with screenshots on February 1, 2006 at 1:55 am
[…] Dave Winer, the father of RSS as some refer to him, gave Microsoft’s official entry into RSS space some positive mojo but then left himself an out by saying that these days he was primarily a Mac user “these days” and hadn’t actually downloaded and tried the software. In other words, Dave is glad to see Microsoft join the party, he’s just not sure if what they are wearing is in style. […]
Posted by New Bits of Reality » Blog Archive » Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Not That A Big Improvement on February 1, 2006 at 1:57 am
[…] Second time is luckier, it manages to start and not crash. Yet! So what’s changed? Not much from the beta 1. A bit of polishing on the GUI. Supposedly better feeds handling though i still haven’t completly understood how it handles them and why is everybody so keen about MS supporting feed parsing. Instead of relying on MS, an open source, standards based library could be put together for everyone to use. […]
Posted by finndinn on February 1, 2006 at 2:48 am
Just tried to install beta on Windows 2000 Professional and been told that ‘your architecture is not supported’. Just wanted to see how much of everyone else’s innovation they have been forced to play catch-up with.
Posted by Stephen on February 1, 2006 at 4:10 am
That is the text on the bottom of the download page.
Posted by Philip Miseldine on February 1, 2006 at 4:45 am
Big deal, this is already out as a mature framework in Mac OS-X Tiger. Yep, they changed the icon colour to blue, but OS level subscription lists? Tick. Browser integration? Tick.
And just to add something constructive to the conversation instead of just rampant fanboy-ism, for code to be considered an “RSS Platform”, surely the creation of content must be supported too? At this point, IE7 simply acts as an aggregator whilst exposing its subscription list in an API.
It’s only the ubiquity of IE that’s making any of this stuff seem important.
Posted by Vinny Carpenter’s Link blog » Blog Archive » links for 2006-02-01 on February 1, 2006 at 7:21 am
[…] Dave’s WordPress Blog – Microsoft ships RSS platform Microsoft has released a public beta of version 7 of their Internet Explorer web browser. Trelease is significant for publishers who provide RSS 2.0 feeds for their content because this is the first Microsoft release that includes comprehensive support f (tags: rss ie Microsoft browsers Vista ie7.0beta2) Explore posts in the same categories: Daily Links […]
Posted by jd on February 1, 2006 at 2:41 pm
I love the RSS support for raw feeds. Much less intimidating for the new user. But I wish IE would respect the appearance of feeds that already have style sheets for browser-friendliness. In the case of FeedBurner feeds, the Subscribe Now! section (which contains “Add to” buttons for a variety of aggregators) is lost.
Posted by drhaisook on February 1, 2006 at 6:15 pm
That’s interesting actually .. 🙂
Posted by A Feed Is Born » IE7 loves RSS - RSS, Webfeeds and Information Overload! on February 2, 2006 at 6:47 am
[…] Dave Winner: “This release is significant for publishers who provide RSS 2.0 feeds for their content because this is the first Microsoft release that includes comprehensive support for RSS not only on the producing side, but also on the consuming side. Until now, Microsoft has not shipped an RSS reader, and now they have, for Windows XP, a operating system with many millions of users. Their aggregator, and the underlying platform, is likely to be used in very large volume, likely becoming the most-installed aggregator.” This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 and is filed under RSS Readers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. […]
Posted by Dave’s Wordpress Blog » Scott, they need a River on February 2, 2006 at 5:27 pm
[…] PS: I only praised Microsoft for respecting the simplicity of RSS, and I meant it. I didn’t say their software would be useful to anyone. I won’t use it. I won’t recommend it to anyone either. I told them this by groaning out loud much as you are when they demo’d it to me. But what are you going to do? They’re the Biggest of the Big. They know better, and it always takes them three times to get it right. However, even Multiplan 1.0 was a spreadsheet. I’m sure they looked at Visicalc before they designed it. We’ve lost some ground here, I’m afraid. […]
Posted by the other blogosopher site » Blog Archive » Microsoft ships RSS platform on February 3, 2006 at 9:02 am
[…] Dave’s WordPress Blog » Microsoft ships RSS platform […]
Posted by Techhash » Blog Archive » First Looks: Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Preview on February 16, 2006 at 8:04 am
[…] You can check Dave Winer’s opinion on IE7’s RSS […]
Posted by Breyten’s Dev Blog » Blog Archive » links for 2006-02-06 on April 8, 2006 at 5:29 pm
[…] Dave’s WordPress Blog » Microsoft ships RSS platform “This release is significant for publishers who provide RSS 2.0 feeds for their content because this is the first Microsoft release that includes comprehensive support for RSS not only on the producing side, but also on the consuming side.” (tags: rss microsoft browsers ie vista) […]
Posted by Insects on January 7, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Another great read, although Microsoft were obviously going to in the end 😛
Thanks all!