The Favorites area has been redone in IE7. Now called the Favorites Center, it's simpler to use and more accessible than Favorites in IE6.

Click the yellow star to make the Favorites Center appear, and a pane drops down on the left side of the page. The pane is wider than the Favorites list in IE6 and has three buttons on top: one for Favorites, one for RSS feeds (more on that later), and one for your browsing history. In IE6, Favorites wasn't integrated in this way with the history list -- and, of course, there was no RSS support in IE6.

Built-in RSS support

Another big improvement in IE7 is its impressive RSS support. It outdoes the native RSS support built into Firefox via Live Bookmarks, and also bests the Firefox Sage RSS add-on. In fact, it's a sophisticated enough tool that it might make you throw away your dedicated RSS reader.

Subscribing to a feed is exceedingly simple. When you're on a site that features an RSS feed, the small RSS button on the Internet Explorer toolbar, normally gray, lights up orange. Click it and select a feed to read it, and if you decide you want to subscribe, click "Subscribe to this feed." As with Favorites, you can save feeds to folders, as a way to easily organize them.