Treating websites as appsThe most useful innovation in IE9 is the introduction of what Microsoft calls pinned shortcuts. The idea behind this feature is straightforward: you open a website in an IE9 tab, then drag its icon from the address bar (or drag the tab itself) onto the Taskbar, where it’s pinned just like a program. The result is a shortcut that uses the site’s favicon instead of the generic IE icon. Here’s what it looks like in action:
On the Windows 7 taskbar, pinned website shortcuts look exactly like app shortcuts. If the site developer has uploaded a full-size favicon, the pinned shortcut looks exactly like a locally installed program. The section of the Taskbar shown here includes a mix of standard apps and pinned shortcuts. Note the full-size Amazon icon at the right side of the bottom row. The ZDNet icon above it shows what happens if you visit a site that uses a small favicon.
Philosophically, these special shortcuts represent a way to divide web content into two distinct types. For basic browsing, you can save a site as a favorite, which is an ordinary shortcut that opens in an ordinary Internet Explorer window, with its tab identified by the IE icon on the associated Taskbar button. Sites that you pin to the Taskbar, however, behave differently. Two visual differences are immediately obvious. First, the back and forward buttons shift slightly to the right, and the favicon for the site appears in the newly vacated space. And second, those navigation buttons pick up the predominant color of the favicon, just as program buttons in the Windows 7 Taskbar pick up the icon’s color when a mouse pointer passes over them. This screen shot shows the difference the page at top was opened in a standard IE window, and the one below it was launched from a pinned shortcut.
In IE9, the custom color and the icon in the top left corner provide immediate visual feedback that helps you figure out where you are. That big red ZDNet icon and the bright red navigation buttons are hard to miss. That icon isn’t just decoration, though: click it and you go back to the URL that’s pinned to that shortcut. The Home button on the right isn’t available; the site icon becomes a custom Home button just for that pinned site. Developers can define a site so that it uses its own custom Jump lists when pinned to the Windows 7 Taskbar. I haven’t seen any such Jump lists “in the wild,” so this example comes from a Microsoft mockup.
The rest of the browser interface remains intact when you use a pinned shortcut. The Favorites and Settings menus are still in their assigned place. You can also open new tabs in the same windows as the pinned site, a feature that initially had me concerned. The point of promoting specific sites is to help those sites stand out, not just to arbitrarily create extra tab groups. But in practice, I’ve found the design useful, even addictive. It didn’t take long for me to begin creating groups of three or four related tabs for a common activity. For example, I have my blog’s home page pinned to the Taskbar, and I usually open Google Analytics and the WordPress dashboard for the site. Keeping those three tabs in a single group makes it easy for me to click the ZDNet icon on my Taskbar and find one of those tasks, which previously were scattered among dozens of open tabs.
If you’re a power user of Google Chrome, you will immediately spot the similarity between IE9’s pinned shortcuts and Chrome’s Application Shortcuts. Both browsers allow you to save a shortcut to a URL that is in turn saved with the site’s icon. When you click that icon, the associated browser opens in its own window, with a separate process dedicated to it. The idea is to give that web page its own place and its own icon on the Taskbar so you can find it quickly instead of having to look through every open browser tab to find it. I’ve used Chrome application shortcuts for Google services like Mail and Reader, where they shine.
So, are IE9’s pinned shortcuts a ripoff of Chrome’s Application Shortcuts? Once you get past the surface similarities, there are some crucial differences. In Chrome, that shortcut opens a single page with no tab indicator. So, you can assign Gmail to a shortcut and open it with a single click, but you can’t open new tabs in that Chrome window. If you click a link, it replaces the current page or opens in a new window. In fact there’s no tab bar at all, nor is there a back button (although you can right-click and choose Back from the shortcut menu). The settings menu is gone too. The result is that Google app shortcuts work just as well as IE9 pinned shortcuts for single pages that you want to run as if they were an app: your web-based mail service, your WordPress dashboard, a corporate portal. But IE9’s ability to group tabs within that window gives it an edge for my usage scenarios.
In the IE9 beta, there’s one significant technical difference between a regular Internet Explorer window and one that’s been opened using a pinned shortcut. Any add-ins installed for IE are unavailable for the pinned site window. In my daily use, that’s been annoying, because it means I can’t use the handful of IE add-ons I rely on. I can use IESpell to check for typos in a blog post, but not if the WordPress editor is running in a pinned site window. And the indispensable LastPass password manager works in regular IE9 windows but is simply unavailable for pinned site windows. Microsoft says this behavior is by design, and will affect all add-ons (but not accelerators). I plan to ask some add-on makers how they plan to deal with this headache.
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