The reader itself is integrated into the new IE Favorites Center, on the left-hand side of the screen. When you're in the Favorites Center, click Feeds, and your list of feeds and feeds folders appears. Click a folder to list all the feeds in it; click a feed to read it. There's no need to take an action to update your feeds; IE7 does it automatically.

IE7's RSS search and filtering tools are considerable. Not only can you search through the entire feed (and you do search through the whole feed, not just the latest entries you see), but you can also sort by date, title, and author. Better yet, you can filter by any categories the blog or feed has created. So, for example, if you're reading an RSS feed of a blog about Microsoft, you can filter to see only entries about Vista, Internet Explorer, and so on.

All this being said, there could be at least one improvement to its RSS capabilities. Missing is the ability to search across all your RSS feeds, not just inside a single feed. Still, this is a relatively minor quibble; this is a surprisingly powerful RSS reader, intelligently integrated directly into IE.

Search

Internet Explorer has taken a page from Firefox, and now includes a search box in the upper-right corner of the browser window. It's easy to add new providers or change your default search provider.