Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

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.

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.

• Encoding:While you won’t need to muck around with this option very much, you should head here if you visit websites where the text isn’t displaying correctly (usually those in other languages).

The Metro-style version of Internet Explorer 10 is obviously big news because it’s a key component of converting users over to the new Metro environment and its touch-first apps. For the majority of Windows users, however, or those with traditional desktop PCs and laptops, Internet Explorer 10 Metro is decidedly less well-optimized for the input devices they’re using and are comfortable with.

More to the point, it’s also lacking some key functionality, such as the ability to run in a floating window alongside other applications on the desktop. It can’t run add-ons or browser extensions, including ActiveX controls. And while it supports pinning favorite sites to the Start screen, those pinned sites don’t take on their own app-like identity, as do sites you pin (to the taskbar) with the desktop version of Internet Explorer.

So it’s no surprise that IE Metro’s less adventurous cousin is going to get the nod from a very large number of Windows 8 users. But that said, there’s just aren’t many new features in this version of IE. If you’re used to Internet Explorer 9 already, IE 10 will be very familiar.

Under the hood, Microsoft has been thoroughly overhauling the engines that drive the browser’s HTML, CSS (cascading style sheet), and JavaScript rendering: the three core technologies that enable today’s more standards-compliant web. Where IE was once the laughing stock of the web standards world, IE 9, and now to an even greater degree, IE 10, is not only performing well, but it’s leading the way.

Without getting too deep into the technical miasma that are web standards, this leadership takes two forms. The first is an ability to accurately render the various features that web standards bodies recognize as being key parts of the most relevant building blocks of modern web standards—those HTML, CSS, and JavaScript bits. A web developer should be able to target these standards—and not be forced to write to individual browsers and browser versions—and know that what they create will simply work.

The second form of Internet Explorer leadership over competing browsers is performance. One of the most amazing transitions we’ve witnessed in recent years is the methodical remaking of Internet Explorer’s rendering capabilities from being software driven to being pervasively hardware accelerated. This means that any modern PC can offload the rendering of virtually any o-screen element in the browser from the PC’s microprocessor to its graphics processing unit, or GPU. The result is better performance, better battery life, and less general overhead for the system. It’s not just a win-win. It’s a win-win-win.

What’s a “modern” PC? Basically, any PC that was manufactured to run Windows Vista or newer. So any PC that was made since 2006 qualifies for purposes of this discussion.

As far as you and other Windows 8 users are concerned, what really matters is that the browser starts up quickly, runs reliably and with good performance, and renders the sites you visit accurately.