Searching in IE7

Ok, I am going to be straight with you. I am a Firefox user thru & thru. I used the beta since its conception. I cursed at the bugs & praised the innovations. Since its formal release, I have continued to download the nightly builds just for the opportunity to spy new features. Therefore, I guess I am saying that I am biased, but I still need Internet Explorer.

Many work or public web spaces I visit require IE (e.g. Windows Update). I do not hate IE, I just do not prefer it. The biggest thing for me was the lack of tabbed browsing in pre-IE7 builds.

When IE7 was released, I immediately upgraded. My attitude towards IE did not change, but it became less pronounced. IE7 incorporated several Firefox-like features that helped blur the line between the IE & Firefox product lines.

One of the nice changes to IE, which Firefox already had, was the addition of the search field. Now I can select a search provider and maintain a listing of other providers I could optionally use in IE. This was great. Before, if I was viewing a page in IE and I wanted to search Wikipedia, I would have to switch to Firefox and perform the search (or another instance of IE with the Wikipedia web site). Now I can do this task inline without moving to another browser window.

While it is a nice addition, I have an issue with its implementation.

When IE7 first launches, I see the following for the search field:

IE7 displays the ghost text ‘Google’ in the search field. I now know what search engine I am using without having to click something to find out.

Now let us search for something, say ‘Windows Live Spaces’. After completing the search, I now see this:

Do you see the problem? I have now lost the information about what search engine I’m using. For people who use one search engine, this is not a problem. For me, and anyone who uses more then one, this is an annoyance. Many times I have entered new text in the search field, hit ‘Enter’, and I get the search results I was not expecting.

Remember my scenario above about searching Wikipedia? If my default engine is Google but I intended to search Wikipedia, I need to repeat the search process to get the results I am expecting, after I change the default provider to Wikipedia.

In Firefox, I rarely have this problem, because with one glance I know what engine I am using:

Firefox always displays the logo of the selected search engine:

The logo gives me a quick visual indicator that avoids forcing me to verify my search engine before I search. Here is how I double-check my provider in IE7:

Now to go and submit an enhancement request 🙂