With that data-driven approach to identifying and refining common tasks, it's understandable that there are few new power-user features in IE9. This shortened menu should make those menus unnecessary for the great majority of common tasks. The classic full menus (Page, Safety, Tools, and Help) are still available with a tap of the Alt key. In that spirit, one of the biggest changes the IE9 designers made was to hide the command bar and replace it with this pared-down Settings menu. By contrast, 73% of IE users have hovered on the Windows 7 taskbar button to find a tab, and 59% have closed a window using the close button on one of those Taskbar thumbnail previews. For example, I love the Quick Tabs feature in IE (which displays thumbnails of all open tabs), but that puts me in an elite group-only 1.7% of all IE users ever use this feature. It's shocking to see exactly how unpopular some well-established power-user features are among the public at large. Microsoft shared some of those numbers with me. Mining that data allows planners to figure out what Windows users do (and don't do) when browsing, and they can test hypotheses and feature refinements in the field and in formal usability lab testing. Microsoft has mountains of real-world data from its opt-in Customer Experience Improvement Program for Internet Explorer 8, drawn from hundreds of millions of sessions from tens of millions of IE users. Many of the key decisions that define how IE9 works were made, literally, by the numbers. I plan to ask some add-on makers how they plan to deal with this headache. Microsoft says this behavior is by design, and will affect all add-ons (but not accelerators). And the indispensable LastPass password manager works in regular IE9 windows but is simply unavailable for pinned site windows. 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. In my daily use, that's been annoying, because it means I can't use the handful of IE add-ons I rely on. Any add-ins installed for IE are unavailable for the pinned site window. 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. But IE9's ability to group tabs within that window gives it an edge for my usage scenarios. 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. 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). If you click a link, it replaces the current page or opens in a new window. 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. In Chrome, that shortcut opens a single page with no tab indicator. 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. I've used Chrome application shortcuts for Google services like Mail and Reader, where they shine. 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. When you click that icon, the associated browser opens in its own window, with a separate process dedicated to it. Both browsers allow you to save a shortcut to a URL that is in turn saved with the site's icon. 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. 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. 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. It didn't take long for me to begin creating groups of three or four related tabs for a common activity. But in practice, I've found the design useful, even addictive. The point of promoting specific sites is to help those sites stand out, not just to arbitrarily create extra tab groups. You can also open new tabs in the same windows as the pinned site, a feature that initially had me concerned. The Favorites and Settings menus are still in their assigned place. The rest of the browser interface remains intact when you use a pinned shortcut.
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