• Hyperlinked Images: Right-click a hyperlinked image, and you’ll see Copy, Copy Link, Open link in a new tab, Open link, and Save to Picture library.
• Text: If you select a block of text on a web page, you can right-click to copy it to the clipboard.
• Hyperlinked text: Right-click hyperlinked text, and you’ll see Copy Link, Open link in a new tab, and Open link.
But most actions will work as expected in IE Metro. You can tap hyperlinks to access the underlying page, scroll with your finger, and so on. Here are some key navigational concerns you’ll want to know about in Internet Explorer for Metro.
As with mobile device browsers, IE Metro does not support the notion of Home, let alone allow you to configure multiple homepages, as does the desktop version of IE. Instead, the browser maintains state between sessions, and even between shutdowns, so that the last site you were visiting—all open tabs, really—are automatically reloaded the next time you open IE Metro.
As noted previously, the IE Metro navigation bar sports both Back and Forward buttons for normal navigation, albeit without any advanced features. But when you consider that IE Metro will normally be used in a chrome-less mode in which the navigation bar and tab switcher are hidden, re-enabling the navigation bar just for basic purposes could get pretty tedious. Fortunately, there are other ways.
Keyboard users can utilize the standard Alt + Left Arrow and Alt + Right Arrow combinations for Back and Forward, respectively. But since Metro in general and IE Metro specifically are designed for multi-touch interfaces, it’s more likely that you’ll want to utilize some new gestures to navigate Back and Forward. To do so, simply tap and hold near the edge of the screen and then swipe toward the middle. If you do so from the left edge of the screen, you’ll navigate back. Do so from the right, and you’ll navigate forward.
But even mouse users have a new way to navigate. If you move the mouse cursor near the left edge of the screen, you’ll see a new Back transport control appear, as in Figure 7-9. You can click this control to navigate Back without needing to first display the navigation bar. A similar control appears on the right side of the screen for Forward.
Figure 7-9: The IE Back tip lets you navigate back without having to first display the navigation bar.
Keyboard users will want to remember one of two quick keyboard shortcuts to more quickly bring up the address bar: Alt + D or Ctrl + L. Of course, with a mouse, you can simply right-click any blank area in IE Metro.
As with any web browser, you can arbitrarily visit any website by typing its name into the address bar. As described previously, however, the address bar is hidden by default. So swipe up from the bottom edge of the display (or down from the top) to display the navigation bar, which includes the address bar.
Since the Metro version of IE is focused on providing basic web browsing functionality in a package that is touch-friendly, it doesn’t include all of the features of its desktop cousin. Or in some cases, it hides functionality in order to keep the display minimalist.
One of the classic examples of this latter user interface miscue is Favorites. It’s in there. In fact, IE Metro synchronizes your Favorites list with the desktop version and, if you’ve enabled it, with other PCs as well. But this browser offers absolutely no way to access your Favorites as a list or menu. And it provides no way to save a site as a Favorite. Instead, you must pin favorite sites to the Start screen.
But since IE Metro does at least synchronize with your list of Favorites, there must be some way to access these sites from the browser, right? Right. And there is. It’s just not clear to us how anyone would ever discover this functionality on their own.
The only way to access Favorites in IE Metro is via search: Select the address bar and start typing. As you do, the navigation tiles at the top of the display change to display search results that match what you’re typing. And these results comprise four things: frequently accessed sites, pinned sites, very popular websites, and … wait for it … your Favorites. You can see this effect in Figure 7-10.
Figure 7-10: Favorites are available only when you search through the address bar.
Favorites, pinned sites, and your browsing history are all synced from PC to PC if you sign in to Windows 8 with a Microsoft account, as discussed in Chapter 2.
Why so opaque? It’s pretty clear that Microsoft considers the Favorites list a legacy interface and would prefer users to start moving toward pinned sites. This will be fine for average consumers who only store a handful of frequently visited sites. But power users will need to know the workaround, or simply stick with the desktop version of IE.
You can access the Frequent list, as the list of frequently accessed sites is called, and your pinned sites—but not your Favorites—simply by selecting the address bar. This navigation list display is shown in Figure 7-11.
Figure 7-11: Frequent and Pinned sites are available when you just select the address bar.
Tabs provide a convenient way to access multiple websites from the same browser window. And IE Metro, as a modern mobile web browser, offers decent tab functionality. As noted earlier, you can access the new tab switcher by using the top or bottom edge UI (or the Winkey + Z shortcut) and manage tabs from there. But your old tab skills work as well. You can use Ctrl + T to open a new tab, for example, and Ctrl + W to close one.
Internet Explorer Metro also provides access to InPrivate tabs, special tabs whose browser history will not be recorded as you go, providing a sense of privacy. InPrivate Browsing is available via a button in the tab switcher, but you can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + P. However you choose to engage this feature, you’ll see a display similar to that in Figure 7-12, indicating that InPrivate Browsing is on and you’re safe.
Figure 7-12: InPrivate Browsing keeps your browsing history private.
You can switch between open tabs most easily with the keyboard: The Ctrl + Tab keyboard shortcut from desktop IE works identically in IE Metro.
If you’ve ever used a mobile browser before, you know that most support a cool, touch-based system in which you pinch the screen or double-tap the screen to zoom in to and out of specific areas of a web page. Not surprisingly, IE Metro supports these gestures too. And they make a big difference in the way you’ll read many web pages.
Consider a typically busy website like the one shown in Figure 7-13. While it is possible to read such a site on larger screens, the text is small and hard to read with smaller displays like those on a slate-based device.
Figure 7-13: Modern websites are often difficult to read on portable devices like those running Windows 8.
Internet Explorer 10 for Metro offers two ways to cut through the clutter. First, you can double-tap the screen to zoom in to the area you tapped, such as a column of text. This will resemble the screen shown in Figure 7-14.