I completely agree with Fred on his post about IE7 pissing him off, and I want to further explain just how brutal IE’s hijack is.

You should really read Fred’s post because it has an excellent visual description of the extent of the problem, but here’s a quick summary for those who did not read Fred’s post: when you view an RSS feed in a browser, it looks like coded crap. The way to avoid this problem is to link a stylesheet (XSL document) from the RSS feed so the browser can render the RSS feed nicely. Anyone with a Feedburner RSS feed can take advantage of this nice rendering feature by turning on the “Browser Friendly” feature on their feed. With the release of IE7, Microsoft (MS) will ignore any stylesheet you use and your feed and replace it with their own. Furthermore, on MS’s stylesheet MS gives you the opportunity to subscribe to the feed, but only with MS’s aggregator. That’s the problem in a nut shell.

I can understand why MS wanted to add a stylesheet when none is defined in order to avoid the raw XML dump problem with RSS that we all have encountered before. But, MS is completely ignoring standards when they take a feed, dump the defined stylesheet, and replace it with their own. MS is violating the XSL Recommendation by the W3C, and that’s total bull. The result is more fractured/splintered viewing experience for users and more headaches for developers who have to do more forking of code to support special browser-specific behavior. This is the Javascript/Jscript nightmare all over again.

Furthermore, in using the early release candidate of IE7, I have found no way to replace IE7 as the default feed aggregator. Anyone using an aggregator should be upset about this. There should clearly be an option under “Internet Tools -> Internet options -> Programs” that allows you to choose the aggregator of your choice, just like you can choose the email client, html editor, usenet browser, etc of your choice.

MS clearly stated on multiple occasions that they were serious about making IE7 as standards compliant as possible.

Chris Wilson Group Program Manager for IE7 said, “Standards improvements […] was really the largest focus of our platform work overall.”

Really Chris? The largest focus? This stylesheet-hijacking feature makes me think that MS “lost focus” last year. Must have been the release of Halo 2, the grim reaper of focus.