I've been using the Internet Explorer feedback system to report bugs I've found and voting for features that need to be added, and I have to say this system looks less than promising.

It's certainly a step in the right direction from the completely invisible bug report system from Internet Explorer 6 and below, but it falls far short from Firefox's Bugzilla system for one very important reason: although user bug reports are now publicly viewable, it seems development progress to fix these bugs is still as invisible as ever. Every bug report has the exact same response from Microsoft: Thank you for contacting the IE team. We will be examining the reported issue and sending it to the appropriate parties. There is no indication regarding whether or not any of the bug fixing progress will be posted at all.

The thing that makes Bugzilla so great for us end-users is that we get to see the discussion going on among the developers, what kind of progress they're making, who's working on it, and so on. With the Internet Explorer feedback system, we're in the dark about all of that. For this reason, it's foolish to refer to this system as similar to Bugzilla.

I have other gripes with the system as well. First of all, why are users required to register and log in to read bug reports? I can understand requiring users to register in order to submit bugs, vote, or comment, but I shouldn't have to log in just to search and read reports. It's especially annoying because for whatever reason, no matter what bubble I select, the system never keeps me logged in across browsing sessions. Come on Microsoft, remembering user login status isn't a difficult task.

The Internet Explorer blog (and other MSDN blogs) and now this bug report system just give me the feeling that either the developers of these systems aren't particularly skilled in what they're doing or they're using the wrong tools for the job. It's the same feeling I got when the Google Groups 2 interface was new, but in the case of the MSDN blogs, the system doesn't seem to be evolving at all. I wouldn't be surprised if upper management requires the developers to only use home-grown tools, but these guys should know that the lack of quality is really noticeable and doesn't reflect well upon them at all.

(Here I'm posting this from Blogger, which once looked promising, but now, after development slowed to an apparent stop, feels pretty crappy compared to systems like WordPress.)