Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

• 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.

• 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.