Finally, here’s a fun Windows 8–specific feature you’ll see from time to time. When you visit a website that offers a Windows 8 app, it can change the Page tools app bar button and menu. The button will display a small plus sign, and when you click it, a third new menu choice, Get app for this site, will appear, as shown in Figure 7-22.
Figure 7-22: Sites can advertise their Windows 8 Metro app through IE Metro.
Tap that item and the Windows Store will open and navigate to the app’s landing page.
If you’re familiar with Internet Explorer 9, you know that Microsoft added a unique ability to this version of its web browser: The ability to pin websites to the Windows 7 Start menu and taskbar, alongside those for traditional Windows applications. These pinned sites work much like regular applications, and they appear in a special version of the Internet Explorer 9 browser frame that is color-coded to match the design of the underlying site.
The desktop version of Internet Explorer 10 provides this same capability in Windows 8, but the new Metro-style version of IE 10 offers a unique, Metro-based take on this functionality: You can now pin websites to the Start screen as well.
This makes sense when you consider that the Start screen is replacing the application-launching functionality of the Start menu and taskbar in Windows 8. But there are some curious behaviors—and differences with taskbar/Start menu pinning—to know about.
To pin a website to the Start screen, load it in Internet Explorer Metro and then tap the Pin button in the navigation bar. (This bar may be hidden. If so, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen or use your other new Metro skills to display it.) As shown in Figure 7-23, you’re given a chance to rename the site before it’s pinned. (Some websites have annoying long names.)
Figure 7-23: You’re given the opportunity to rename the site before you pin it to the Start screen.
Once you tap the Pin to Start button, the site is pinned. You’ll need to manually leave Internet Explorer to see this, however, so press the Windows key on your keyboard (or access the Start option in the Charms bar) to return to the Start screen. Since all newly pinned items are added to the end of the Start screen—on the far right—you’ll need to scroll over there to see the pinned site. This can be seen in Figure 7-24.
From here, you can perform basically two different actions. You can move the pinned website tile to a new location or you can unpin it.
Start screen customization is discussed in Chapter 5.
Pinned site tiles can provide simple alphanumeric notification badges just like they can on the taskbar, with the canonical example being an e-mail service that displays the number of unread e-mails. But the tiles for pinned websites simply aren’t as expressive as those for Metro-style apps can be.
Figure 7-24: All newly pinned items are placed at the end of the Start screen by default.
Within the browser, however, pinned sites also offer another feature borrowed from pinned taskbar sites: Jump lists. So if you tap that site tile, you’ll notice that IE Metro loads with a slightly different user interface, assuming that the pinned site utilizes jump lists: The Pin to Start button in the navigation bar has been replaced by a new menu button. And if you click this button, you’ll see whatever jump list the site provides, as shown in Figure 7-25. (The items in this menu will vary from site to site.)
Figure 7-25: A jump list displayed in IE Metro
If you’re familiar with pinned sites in IE 9 and Windows 7, you know that they run in their own browser frame. But this isn’t the case with IE 10 Metro and Windows 8. Instead, these pinned sites load inside the same IE Metro app as any other web pages, and they will load alongside whatever other tabs were already open in the browser.
Configuring IE 10 Metro
Mouse users can activate the Charms bar by moving the mouse cursor to the upper right (or lower right) of the screen and then moving the cursor along the right edge of the screen toward the middle. Then click the Settings charm.
The Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 is configured just like all other Metro-style apps, via the globally available Settings pane. To activate this pane, swipe in from the right of the screen to display the Charms bar and then tap Settings. IE 10 Metro settings can be found at the top of the Settings pane, as shown in Figure 7-26.
Figure 7-26: IE 10 for Metro settings can be accessed from the Settings pane.
Keyboard users can use the Winkey + I shortcut to go directly to Internet Explorer Settings.
Internet Explorer Settings is accessed by tapping the Settings link. As you can see in the aggregated view of this unique interface shown in Figure 7-27, which most likely won’t be completely viewable on your screen and will need to be scrolled vertically to see all the options, there’s a lot going on here.
Available settings include the following:
• Delete Browsing History: Deletes all temporary files, cookies, and saved passwords. Unfortunately, there’s no way to delete the contents of just one; it’s an all-or-nothing, one-click option.
• Permissions: Although this isn’t a common feature yet, with more and more portable computing devices being sold every year, some websites are starting to request location information from visitors in an effort to offer a personalized, location-based experience (or, more nefariously, advertisements). By default, IE 10 will trigger a notification when such a request is made. But you can turn off this behavior—and thus allow all sites to automatically grab your location data—if you’d like. A separate Clear button lets you clear the list of sites for whom you’ve OK’d location data, once again triggering those notifications each time a location request comes in.
Figure 7-27: Internet Explorer Settings
• Zoom: By default, Internet Explorer displays web pages normally, at a zoom level of 100 percent. But depending on the resolution and size of the screen (or, with a tablet, the device itself), you may want to configure the browser to always display items a bit bigger, or smaller. That’s where Zoom comes in. You can zoom as low as 60 percent, and as high as 260 percent, and thanks to Windows’ amazing text rendering capabilities, the results will be readable and surprisingly clear regardless of which zoom setting you choose. But this feature is particularly useful for high DPI displays (smaller screens with very high resolutions, typically), because normally displayed websites will look too small.
Zoom is one of those features that makes IE 10 for Metro more palatable on a big screen display. Just set the zoom level to 140 or 160 percent and enjoy the big-screen goodness. You can see a typical zoomed website in Figure 7-28.
Figure 7-28: Internet Explorer can elegantly resize websites to fit the size and resolution of your screen: Here, 125% zoom is utilized.
• Flip ahead: This new IE 10 feature—also available separately in the desktop version of the browser—helps site navigation work faster by silently preloading page linked from the current page in the background. Because it requires sending some information to Microsoft to work, this feature is opt-in and disabled by default.