Deleting Temporary Internet Files in IE7?

not any longer a stand alone?

[henry0]

How do you del your TIF in IE7
It seems that if you clik the button it will del as well history, visited pages etc..
Any way to only deal with the TIF like IE6 allowed us to.
thanks

[Trace]

In my opinion, the gui for that kind of stuff has been greatly improved.

Now in IE7 when you go to delete your temporary files, the window has a button for each of the following options;

- Temporary Internet Files
- Cookies
- History
- Form data
- Passwords

You can delete them one by one.

I don't know what you're looking at.

[edited by: Trace at 4:37 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2006]

[henry0]

From Internet Options
Browser history
"Delete TIF, history, cookies etc."
Only one button shows "delete"
From the same Options area IE6 was clearly showing a button per task
Are you saying that if I click “delete” only then I will have a choice
If so this is pure nonsense, how one will guess? When I read delete
To me it means “delete”

[tedster]

Under "Tools > Internet Options" I see what henry0 sees -- no separate options. I depend on the extended functionality available in the IE Developers Toolbar [microsoft.com] (including delete cookies by domain, and delete cache by domain).

[j_h_maccann]

In IE7 released, under "Internet Options" you see on the main tab "Browsing History" and the single button "Delete...". Everyone should know the vital importance of the "..." in GUI interfaces, going back to the original Mac: when you click on "Delete..." you get a set of further precise choices, exactly as described above.

[henry0]

Got it thanks, just needed to trust you and click on that del button.
Never used a MAC!
futher my wide laptop monitor (1920 resolution)
requires a brand new set of eyes :)

[tedster]

Thanks from me too, I Iearned something. Nice functionality -- but a bad news GUI. Now I know they didn't do very thorough end user testing

[j_h_maccann]

bad news GUI ... they didn't do very thorough end user testing

On the contrary. This convention that a menu item or button with a label ending in "..." takes no immediate action but brings up further choices has been true for over twenty years. It was true on the first Mac in 1984, and has been followed in all version of Mac and all versions of Windows since then. Both designers and users are very familiar with it. There are novelties in WinVista and Office, but this isn't one of them.

There may be a few people who never noticed it, but after more than two decades of consistent use any replacement by a different convention would confuse the great majority.

[tedster]

I stand corrected -- sort of. You see, I'm still not sure that 22 years of convention means that it is a good GUI, no matter what the early adopters of home computing became accustomed to in 1984.

And with so many web users today being relatively new to home computing, I still don't like it - it just feels geeky and unclear to me. Two of us in this backwater thread didn't understand, and I'll bet that a straw poll among my family and friends would easily turn up more.

I do feel educated now, and I'm glad for that - thank you. But I first started using a browser in 1994, and if I could miss something for that long, then I'll bet I'm not alone.

[j_h_maccann]

It would be interesting if many people hadn't tumbled to the "..." convention by now, because it is very widely used. In Word 2003, for example, the File menu alone contains items "Open..." and "Close". It contains "Save" and "Save As...". It contains "Print Preview" and "Print...". In each case the menu item without "..." does something immediately, and the menu item with "..." brings up a dialog box. Same thing for Excel and PowerPoint, and just about all other apps. The same convention is used throughout Windows itself and IE (4,5,6).

In IE6, the "General" tab of "Internet Options" (the corresponding dialog to the one in IE7 being discussed here) uses the same convention. The "Home Page" section at the top has buttons such as "Use Current" which act immediately. The section immediately below "Temporary Internet Files" has buttons such as "Delete Files..." which bring up a dialog. And the convention is visible on almost every tab in IE6. At least you'd expect that users would wonder why some labels end in "..." and others do not.

There has been a lot of study of all these user interface components over their long evolutions, but it's always possible that no one has tested very recently how obvious this "..." convention is to users.

[tedster]

Interesting -- I use those buttons all the time and really hadn't noticed the dots. That's probably because the labeled action[s] are clearly what I want, and I also know how to reverse them. It's that dread feeling of losing something I may want to keep that prevented me from clicking on the "delete..." tab. (And the fact that I already had improved functionality in the Developer's Toolbar.)

Also playing in here is the fact that I have been unhappy with a lot of what Microsoft put out in IE over the years and just didn't trust them to be sane.