xpsp2 beta pop-up manager feedback

I thought I would take some time to respond to some of the feedback from the beta. First, we have gotten a lot of very positive feedback on the Pop-up Manager. I am very happy about this. I have always been excited to work on IE because it is used by so many people. Having all those people excited about something in the product is even better. Despite all the joy, there have been some incoming bugs from the beta program. 

Script error when pop-up is blocked -- This happens when a web page calls window.open() and then blindly uses the return value without checking for null. This is bad because window.open() can fail for reasons other then IE deciding to block a pop-up, such as out of memory, etc. Some third party pop-up management tools suppress the script error but the script still stops running. 

Adding *.domain.com to white list does not work -- This is a known bug. We did not have time to add the wild card functionality for the beta. This has now been implemented and will work in the next release.

Various pop-ups are blocked or not blocked inappropriately -- There are reports that some pop-ups are allowed when they should not be or are blocked when they should be allowed through. We will investigate each of these and see where the problem lies. 

There were also a few requests to add various bells and whistles. Some of these were things we had already considered or are still taking under consideration, and some were quite outlandish. One of our guiding principles for this feature was to keep things simple for the user-- they turn it on, forget about it, and it just works. I have personally seen third party pop-up managers with, literally, hundreds of options to tweak and play with. Having that level of detailed control is great for us geeks, but for something built-in to IE it is unreasonable.

On a completely personal and unrelated side note, I take it as a sort of personal defeat whenever I am forced to add another dialog box to the product.