The reason for this overloaded user interface is simple. Internet Explorer 10 is a fairly complex and certainly full-featured app, just like its desktop-based cousin. And it requires the additional space for commands that’s afforded by the extra chrome.
In some cases, only the navigation bar will appear, allowing you to type a URL into the address bar or perform other actions. If you don’t see the tab switcher as well, simply swipe down from the top of the screen (or perform any other input action that will display an edge UI).
The Internet Explorer navigation bar has several main user interface components, which are called out in Figure 7-7 and described next.
• Back: This button functions like a simplified version of the Back button commonly found in desktop web browsers. However, in keeping with the Metro design philosophies, it lacks advanced features, such as the ability to tap and hold to access a menu of past pages and the browser History.
Figure 7-7: The IE navigation bar
IE Metro supports other ways to go back to the previously loaded web page. We’ll examine these capabilities in the “Navigating the Web with IE 10 Metro” section.
• Site Icon: A noninteractive button that displays the site’s icon, if any.
• Address bar: This control works much like the address bar in the desktop version of Internet Explorer, but with some key differences. You can, of course, select the address bar to type any arbitrary URL, and then press Enter to start navigation. But IE Metro is unique because a full-screen view of Frequent and Pinned sites is displayed each time the address bar is selected. And as you type, these lists are filtered, on the fly. This feature is so cool, we discuss it more in the “Finding Favorites and Other Websites” section later in this chapter.
Sites with encrypted connections will include a lock badge in the address bar, just as with the desktop version of IE. This control also works as a progress indicator while sites are loading.
To search the web from the address bar, simply type your search query in the address bar. Internet Explorer will search the web using the configured search engine, which, by default, is Bing.
The address bar also lacks some features of the desktop IE’s address bar, including a menu-based auto-complete list and Compatibility View.
• Refresh/Stop: This button works just like its desktop cousin: Tap it to refresh (reload) the current page or, if the currently loading page is stuttering or not completing for some reason, tap it to stop it from loading.
You can still pin websites to the Windows 8 taskbar. But you will do this separately, from the desktop version of IE.
• Pin to Start: While old-school IE users probably cart around a folder full of Favorites—Internet Explorer’s version of the browser bookmarks feature—the cool kids started pinning their favorite sites to the Windows 7 taskbar with IE 9. And now in IE 10, you can pin your favorite sites to the Windows 8 Start screen too. This is how you do it, and because it’s such a great new feature with unique capabilities, we examine it in detail later in this chapter.
The Favorites Bar is no longer available in IE Metro, because of screen real estate reasons.
• Page Tools: This useful tool displays a pop-up menu when tapped. From here, you can utilize IE Metro’s Find on Page and View on the Desktop functionalities. The former helps you search the currently displayed web page for a specific search term. The latter, new to IE 10, loads the currently displayed web page in the desktop version of Internet Explorer. You will also occasionally see a Get app for this site option in the Page Tools menu; in such cases, the button itself will change a bit, adding a small gear graphic, indicating that a Windows 8 Metro-style app is also available.
Forward: Yep, this works much like the Forward button in the desktop version of IE. But as with Back, it lacks advanced features, like the ability to tap and hold to access a menu of past pages and the browser History.
Whereas desktop versions of Internet Explorer feature an always-visible row of browser tabs, IE Metro tries to do more with less, so it hides its new tab switcher and other UI chrome elements by default. But when enabled, the tab switcher, as shown in Figure 7-8, provides the UI elements described next.
Figure 7-8: The IE tab switcher
IE Metro only supports two tab thumbnail rows in the tab switcher. If both rows are full, and you open yet another tab, the oldest tab is removed.
• Active Tab(s): The majority of the tab switcher is occupied with one or more thumbnails representing the currently open browser tabs, each with its own web page loaded. You will always see at least one tab thumbnail here—representing the current page—and if you open enough tabs, a second tab thumbnail row will appear.
• New Tab: This button opens a new tab and then provides a view of your Frequent and (if available) Pinned lists (offering your most frequently accessed sites as well as those you’ve pinned to the Start screen, respectively) and the address bar so you can manually type in a website URL—or a search term—if desired.
Want to close just a single tab? Ctrl + W still works for the current tab. And you can use the little close icon on a tab if you prefer using touch or the mouse.
• Tab Menu: This button displays a small menu when tapped. It has two choices: New InPrivate tab and Close tabs. The former opens a new tab in Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing mode, which prevents anything that happens in that tab from making its way into the global browser History. (What happens in InPrivate Browsing mode stays in InPrivate Browsing mode.) Close tabs is exactly what it sounds like: it simply closes all but the currently displayed tab.
Now that you’re up to speed on the major UI components of the Metro-styled version of Internet Explorer 10, you can turn your attention to actually using the browser. You’ll also see some similarities with desktop IE versions, and some differences, which could prove to be vexing.
Key among these is right-click, or what we call “tap and hold” for touch users. This common action doesn’t work in IE Metro the same as it does in the desktop versions of the browser, and in fact only offers up limited options, depending on what you’ve clicked (or tapped). Right-clicking also brings up the browser navigation bar if you’re not selecting an on-page object.
What this means is that you can’t right-click any element on a web page and access all of the advanced options you get with desktop IE. Instead, you’ll have limited options depending on what you’ve selected:
• Images: Right-click an (unhyperlinked) image, and you’ll see two useful choices in the context menu that appears: Copy, which copies the image to the clipboard, and Save to Picture library.