Reporting a bug in IE7. How hard can it be?

I wanted to be a good Microsoft citizen and install a beta product and use it and give feedback. So downloaded and installed IE7 Beta2 yesterday and started using it. My general impression is that is has caught up to other browsers in the market featurewise and seems to be more secure. All is good.

But as usual, I ran into issues that I wanted to report to Microsoft. So my quest began trying to find a way to do it.

1. First, I tried looking for "Report a bug" link or a button in the UI to make it simple for anyone to report an issue in a beta product. It was futile. I didn't find any.


2. Next I scoured the menus and toolbars for something that would help me report an issue. The closest I found was "Help->Customer Feedback options.." which turned out to be some sort of opt-in UI to send usage data to Microsoft. Disappointing.


3. Next, I chose "Help->Send Feedback" which took me to MS Support website. To my frustration, the web page is the main Microsoft support web page instead something specific to IE7. You chose "Help" from a product and instead of going directly to the product help page, it launched a general support page where users have to drill through the links to find what they need.


4. I did not give up. I found "Report a bug" link (Aha!) which took me to a page with a customer support phone number. Not very good given that I just simply want to type some feedback and send it to Microsoft.

5. So I clicked back to the main support page and this time, clicked on "Select a product" which took me to a web page where IE7 was not listed at all. By now, I was starting to wonder why would help take me to some place useless.


6. At this point, I decided to spend more time to get to the bottom of it. So I clicked "Help->Online Support" which took me to http://support.earthlink.net/. What in the world just happened? I have no services provided by EarthLink and don't recall ever having anything to do with these folks in the last 5 or 6 years. Another road block. Not giving up yet.

7. Next, I went back to the main support page and typed "internet explorer 7 support" in the search box and hit ENTER. Great, it took me to IE7 support home page (Why didn't the Help->Send feedback" take me to this site in the first place?). This page has information more than I am looking for. I was starting to have some faith in Microsoft folks but I still didn't find a link that I can use to simply type some text and hit send. So my saga continues..

8. Going through the page, under "Leave feedback on IE7", there are bunch of options. The web page suggested below as the first options:
Internet Explorer External Feedback
This is the best way to submit Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 bugs to the Internet Explorer team. Access the site now.
You will need to have a Microsoft Passport account in order to use this site. Go to the Passport site to create an account.
In order to submit feedback, go to Microsoft Connect, then select "Available Programs," which will take you through a license agreement. You will see "Internet Explorer Feedback" as one of the list of programs available. Select "Apply" to enroll in the program.

"Access this site now" took me to a login page and after I logged in, showed me a "Page not found" page. Not very pleasent.

9. I then tried the "Microsoft Connect" option under "External Feedback" section and looked for "Available Programs" and it wasn't there. It dawned upon me after few minutes that I should not take any help word by word. I found "Available Connections" instead (What more technical can it be?) and followed the link to find "Internet Explorer Feedback" and clicked on the "Apply" link hoping that it would be a matter of providing my passport e-mail to sign-in and then send the feedback. What a dork I am to expect such luxuries. It asked me to provide bunch of information what I didn't want to. There goes another dead end.
Side Note: I could not use the back button on my browser to go back to my previous page. Which asshole designed this? This is one of the most annoying this on the web where you can get to a page but can't go back with a simple click. It is like being stuck in a backhole..

10. Remember I am determined to get to the bottom. So I tried the next feedback option which is to install the "Microsoft beta client tool" which I clicked obviously. After clicking on O.K buttons bunch of times, I was prompted to install ".Net Framework 2.0". What a crap? In order to install a simple bug reporting program, I now need to download 20+ MB of software etc.. There goes another option.

11. The last option was newsgroups which I am sure will lead me to nowhere and is not what I was looking for.

Thank you Microsoft for making it so easy to report bugs on your product for free and also from users who are brave enough to install a beta product given the fact that Internet Explorer isn't the one with good history for security and reliability.

What did I expect from the World's best software company?
A simple button in the toolbar saying "Report a bug" which would show me a dialog with

• one editbox to enter my feedback
• one more optional editbox to provide my email in case they want to contact me
• And a checkbox to ask if I can be contacted

That is all. Was that too much to ask for? Also, was I complelely stupid to not notice something obvious (even if that is the case, I would fault the usability of it) instead of having to go through all this?

Getting back to what I wanted to report, I noticed 2 bugs with IE7.

1. My blogger site kept asking me to re-login which did not happen when I was using IE6 with blogger for the last year.
2. I see some layout issues when I go to http://expo.live.com

Hope some one from MS reads this and tries to do something about this...