shahine.com/omar/

Since I can remember, I have cursed at IE whenever I have to fill out any kind of form with a drop down menu. The reason being that IE has the silliest text matching algorithm (it just matches on your last keystroke, not the cumulative set of characters you entered).

This is what would typically happen:

1. Order something on the web
2. Enter address information
3. Get to the Country drop down
4. Start typing USA or United States

After each character you entered, IE would change the selection to match the last character.

For example when you type U it would select the first country in the list that stared with U (Uganda). Then when you typed S it would select the first country in the list that started with S. This process would repeat itself as you continued to type.

Or a simpler illustration:

Drop down Contents: [Abc|B|C]

• Type "Abc"
• Selected: "C"

At this point you would curse, and then use the mouse to click the drop down and keep hitting U to cycled through all the countries till you got to the United States. A lot of web sites may place USA or United States as the first entry in the drop down to make this process easier. However, many simply sort the list alphabetically. Amazon.com is one of the smart ones, USA appears first and when you get to the U there are multiple aliases for United States. Of course they are optimizing for folks who live in the USA.

Now, this is how the process works on Mac IE and many other products. As you continue to type, the selection will change to match all the characters you've entered. This behaves a bit like auto complete. So if I type "Unite" United Arab Emirates will be selected. But if I type "United S" then United States will be selected.

Or a simpler illustration:

Drop down Contents: [Abc|B|C]

• Type "Abc"
• Selected: "Abc"

It seems that IE 7b3 (possibly an earlier version, but I just noticed) has finally fixed this long standing annoyance. For that the team has my eternal gratitude .

This is a really tiny miniscule deal, but the fact that it's been broken for so long and was just fixed means to me that some one cared enough to work through a pile of crap to do the right thing... and that's no easy job sometimes. Many products at Microsoft have a "it's been like this for 3 versions so it will stay like that forever... no sense in fixing it now... plus I don't want to cause that code is really scary to touch" reality.

This has seriously been one of my big pet peeves of using Windows since I switched to the platform full time (from the Mac).