Saturday, December 13, 2008

Report a webpage problem add-on for Internet Explorer 8 beta

You are using Internet Explorer 8 Beta and while browsing you come across web sites which have some problem as in rendering or scripting errors or any other type of problem you come across. And you wanted to report it, but where to? Now you have an add-on for IE8 Beta for reporting such problems directly to Microsoft.

After installing, The ‘Report a Webpage Problem’ Internet Explorer Add-on appears as a toolbar button.

IE8repwbppgz When the toolbar button is clicked or the menu item is chosen, the control takes a screenshot of the web page currently being viewed. A new tab is then opened containing a report submission form. A scaled down version of the screenshot will be visible at the bottom, and the user has a choice of whether or not to include the full-sized screenshot

On the report submission page, the user also has the option to select a category best representing their observed problem. This category selection will be part of the report information returned to Microsoft.

A 1000 character limit comment field is provided, if the user chooses to include some description of the problem.

Additional data included in the report:

  • The protocol type (http, res, file, etc.) of the URL being reported.
  • The complete URL.
  • A numerical value representing the Document mode.
  • For more information about what data is sent and how it is used, see the Privacy Statement

You can get this add-on from here.

Just installed this add-on on IE8 RC1, which was released for testing community recently.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, that's a pretty cool idea. Finally, Microsoft is learning to take direct feedback from users.

I wonder how Microsoft will fix web rendering issues though. It's not like all sites comply to Microsoft's orders. I'm wondering if some purposely don't update their site compatibility to get users to switch to another browser...

Anyway, it's nice to see the IE team being more proactive in making a better browser. IE8 has now made IE a viable competitor with Firefox. Now I wonder if IE9 will go even further to beat Firefox...

Vasudev said...

Yes, I agreee Quikboy. IE8's progress has been systamatic. They also conduct IE8 chat sessions with makers of IE8, where one can put forward various suggestions, bugs etc directly to IE8 team.

Some of the other MS products like various Windows Live Apps also have send feedback option built into the apps.