I've spent the last few years defending Microsoft as an innovators, and then they go release something like live.com. I've been underwhelmed with the live.com effort from day one, but I've been good about biting my tongue. But remarkably I just had an ever more underwhelming experience and I need to vent. Yes, I know it's beta... but the bar for betas has been raised. .

How can you not have a proper export / sync tool for favorites.live.com? I don't want to export to an HTML page - I want my favorites synchronized. I've already went and installed an Active X control, so that's the least you could do fo rme. ( Or maybe it is there, and just so poorly designed that I can't find it. Either way, I'm not impressed ). In fact, I do have my favorites synchronized, but I'm doing it with FolderShare (good call on that one, Microsoft) ... but uh, doesn't that defeat the purpose of favorites.live.com? 

Speaking of which, why are we still relying on ActiveX controls here? Come on guys... this is a big security hole. As you undoubtedly know, ActiveX runs as with the same trust level as local executables, a problem compounded by the fact that most users are still probably running with admin rights. We've spent years trying to convince parents and grandparents and siblings not to allow them to be installed and dealing with the aftermath when they did. SP2 improved things a bit... and then we take 4 big steps backwards by releasing your "next big thing" on top of ActiveX? We're just asking for trouble here.

Oh... and if I'm running fully trusted code on my machine anyways, why make me do this in a browser? Why not give me a rich client interface? Did we forget about that whole No-Touch Deployment Smart Clients thing already? At least that's running with a proper sandbox. Do I really need to defrag my hard drive from a web page? ( At least OneCare runs as a local app! )

Sigh.