Pinned Sites

Instead of trumpeting its own branding, IE9 gives the site you're visiting center stage. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the new pinned-site feature. By simply dragging a webpage's icon down to the Windows 7 taskbar, you create a pinned site. This gives the site equal billing with an application. This is strongly reminiscent of Google's idea of every app as a Web app. With its pinned sites, IE9 goes further than Chrome in this regard. Chrome does have Web applications shortcuts, but they don't get IE9's OS integration. These include Windows 7 jumplists for sites that supply the necessary XML data in their code.

IE9 pinned sites not only get their own taskbar icons, but their favicon is used where a browser logo would normally be, in the upper left corner of the window, and even the back and forward buttons take on the color of the site icon. The logo and colors for IE9 pinned sites are automatically grabbed by the browser for display in the window border. If you navigate to a different domain, the icon remains the same as the original pinned site, which struck me as a bit disorienting. One final difference for pinned sites is that the Home button disappears from their menu bar.

A recent twist on IE9 pinned sited is that you can now add multiple sites to a pinned-site icon. Just open a new tab, right-click on the site icon, and choose "Add as a home page." Though I think that wording could be clarified and the feature made more obvious, the feature offers a convenient way to open a set of frequently visited sites.

Pinned sites are a big ace-in-the-hole for IE9, at least for Windows 7 users, and site owners can promote their sites for pinned treatment and offer buttons on their pages that pin a site automatically. Chrome's application shortcuts do have the advantage of giving the whole window to the site, but Microsoft's giving full app citizenship to sites is commendable.