In my case what I would expect in terms of IE automation would be a set of features as follows:
Accurately determine when a page has been completely loaded.
Reliably locate an HTML control on a page by specifying complete or partial information about the control (ie. the text it displays, the type of tag used).
Recording a Macro of user actions while they surf sites should: automatically apply the first two features
include actions on the browser application in addition to actions on the web page being viewed
[*]Once found, controls could later be referenced with handles similar as to how ME currently deals with Windows app. child controls.
[*]Support integration with the Windows Clipboard that allows copy/paste of data from both the entire client area of the browser as well as with/from specific HTML controls.
[*]Functions that allow the direct action of setting/getting the text or state of an HTML control.
with respect to this it may be worth allowing for special recognition of certain HTML presentation structures such as tables and lists; being able to say that you want the total number of rows/cols or what the string in row 1, col 2 of a table is would be nice. I think, however, this type of thing might fall beyond what most might consider within the scope of a macro app... dunno.
because handling data from webpages is going to typically be text manipulation, it would be good to have some more string-handling functionality in the variable management wizards (like finding where a string begins or ends or how many instances of it there are in a larger body of text).
[*]A handy tool similar to the "Get Control" dialog that currently exists in ME. You would hover this over an HTML control like a text area or radio box to easily add it's "identity" to your Macro, using some or all of the details about it to help locate it on subsequent visits to the page. Not only would this be on enormous benefit in manipulating typical controls such as sliders, buttons, check-boxes, radio-buttons, etc. but it could also be used to ID Flash and Java applets as well as static page objects such as picture elements.
[*]For IE7, tab location and management... of some kind. I haven't really thought about this too much but I think it would come in helpful. I suppose things like getting how many tabs are opened, what their titles are, and being able to switch between them would be desirable functions for an initial implementation.
[*]Possibly a selection of functions that would allow easy access to user-customized browser settings (ie. history, favorites, default search engines and other options).
I would say that's the bulk of functionality that I'm looking for. Sounds like a butt-load of work to me
After trying about a dozen or so windows macro automation apps, there were really only two that had a decent feature set. ME stands out because of it's ease of use, versatility (support for but not-required scripting skills), small learning curve, and price - as you're no doubt aware other products are so grossly overpriced or limited in use it'd be a better option to write the software oneself.