User Experiences: Customizing Pinned Sites

With this week’s beta release, IE9 brings the most familiar experiences of Windows and makes them available for websites and the people who browse them. Users can pin sites in the taskbar just as they pin applications, and launch web tasks directly, the same way they launch everything else in Windows. Websites can program jump lists for pinned sites, to make common tasks easier for their users as part of the desktop experience. Sites can also program notifications when the user pins them in the task bar. The browser has a clean new design that reinforces the site’s visuals, with a large site icon, and that icon’s colors reflected in the back and forward buttons. IE9 does far more than provide shortcuts to sites on the desktop and reduce the space used in the browser interface.

In this post I describe how you, developers, can make the most of these capabilities in Windows and make your web sites shine.

People use many of their websites more like applications and not just webpages to be read. Examples include: Hotmail, Gmail, Bing, Yahoo Finance, CNN, Pandora, Hulu, Netflix, and many others. Today, websites don’t have a direct presence on the PC and you have to effectively “boot twice” – once for the OS, once for the browser – to get to them. To break this barrier and help sites to shine through Windows7, IE9 introduces the ability for any site to be pinned to the Taskbar, the most used interface in Windows. Pinning a site is as easy as dragging a tab to the Taskbar. Alternatively, people who have the taskbar position to the left, right, or top of the screen, can drag the favicon on the IE address bar and drop it on the taskbar to pin a site.

Tear tab out of the browser:

Drop Tab on Taskbar:

After the site is pinned, notice that the focus is on the site. The sites brand shines through to the frame, with a large site icon, and the back and forward buttons match the site’s color.

Developers can customize the pinned experience for their site using a series of APIs called msSiteMode. The APIs are divided in two groups.

The first group defines a set of properties that are set on the site. These properties apply to any one using the site when it is pinned. This functionality is defined using meta-tags.

The second group defines a set of dynamic APIs that are used to surface information that is specific to an individual user. This functionality is defined using JavaScript APIs.

With IE9’s msSiteMode APIs, sites can surface notifications and status updates, enable common site and individual page commands, and provide quick access to commonly used destinations. For example, look at how the internet music site Jango allows you to interact directly with the site from thumbnail toolbar buttons, without having the browser window in the foreground.

This functionality enables new ways for people interact with your sites, and allows you to create a personalized experience for your users that is consistent with the way native applications work on Windows 7.

Jump List Commands

The Windows 7 Jump List brings to the surface commonly used destinations (nouns) and tasks (verbs) of an application. For commands applicable to the whole site, use Jump List Tasks to get the information in the hands of your customers. It allows people to perform common tasks without launching the site in advance.

The following screenshot shows how a site like Amazon could surface its most common navigation and site functionality directly from the Jump List by using Tasks. These commands can also be updated by the site at a later time. This functionality allows you to display site specific information that is fairly static and not updated frequently in the Jump List. These destinations will act as entry points on your site when the browser is not running.

The functionality is surfaced via HTML meta elements. The name of the meta element is msapplication-task with the name, destination, and icon of the Task in the content:

<META name="msapplication-task" content="name=Task 1;action-uri=https://host/Page1.html;icon-uri=https://host/icon1.ico"/>

Meta elements were chosen to represent Jump List Tasks because they provide a way to associate generic site destinations with a document without having to display them. They help us to define information on the page that is parsed but can be ignored if the site is not pinned. They also provide a mechanism to define site installation data that can be used by a user driven installation as well as an API installation. In a similar fashion, Google uses meta tags to control specific search engine crawling and indexing.

Custom Categories

As a developer, you can define custom categories or lists to provide quick access to commonly used destinations on your sites. Using these custom categories, people swiftly return to previously viewed sites, access unique user information (such as radio stations), or keep track of site interactions (perhaps a shopping list). Selecting one of these custom items will navigate directly to that item.

The next example shows a reminder item that is stored in a custom
“Notifications” category list. This functionality allows you to display user specific information dynamically in the Jump List to facilitate navigation. Because this information is persisted after the browser is closed, people can use these destinations as entry points into your site.

The functionality is surfaced via JavaScript APIs. You use msSiteModeCreateJumplist to create the custom category:

window.external.msSiteModeCreateJumplist('List1');

msSiteModeAddJumpListItem to add items to the in-memory representation of the category:

window.external.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem('Item 1', 'https://host/Item1.html', 'https://host/images/item1.ico');

and msSiteModeShowJumplist to display the list in the Jump List:

window.external.msSiteModeShowJumplist();

Notifications & Status

The taskbar allows Windows applications to show overlay icons to surface notifications or status updates. With IE9 you can use the msSiteMode APIs to apply multiple overlay icons to provide a rich set of notifications for your web sites.

The following example shows how you can use a search and numbers icons overlaid on the taskbar to let people know about results found using Twitter. This functionality allows you to notify people that the site requires their attention. Because this can be done while the browser window is minimized or obscured, it makes it easier to get people’s attention while they are working on other tasks.

The functionality is surfaced via JavaScript APIs. You use msSiteModeSetIconOverlay to turn the overlay on:

window.external.msSiteModeSetIconOverlay('https://host/images/overlay1.ico', 'Overlay 1');

And msSiteModeClearIconOverlay to turn the overlay off:

window.external.msSiteModeClearIconOverlay();

Thumbnail toolbar commands

Windows 7’s thumbnail toolbars allow users to access the application’s functionality even when the application is not in focus (or even visible). With msSiteMode APIs, people can access the site without the need to switch to it. The thumbnail toolbar buttons generate events that are sent to the webpage running inside the pinned site window. The events are sent back to the page to handle. Interactions with the page require the browser instance to be running but the browser window doesn’t have to in the foreground. It can be minimized.

The following example shows how these buttons might be used to control a website with podcasts or videos. Using this functionality, people can pause a running podcast without having to switch to the window, just like Windows Media Player. This functionality allows you to surface site commands that can directly interact with the webpage without accessing it.

The thumbnail toolbar for sites are surfaced via JavaScript APIs. You use msSiteModeAddThumbBarButton to add a button to the in-memory Thumbnail toolbar:

btn1 = window.external.msSiteModeAddThumbBarButton( 'https://host/images/button1.ico', 'button 1');

And you use msSiteModeShowThumbBar to display the buttons in the Thumbnail toolbar area:

window.external.msSiteModeShowThumbBar();

Customizing the frame

We made several changes to the browser frame when you pin a site. To help bring the site’s identity into the frame, a large favicon is shown in top left corner of the frame. The icon also acts as a home button for the pinned site so users can easily get back to the starting point for the site. The icon uses the .ico file format which natively handles multiple different sizes within a single package. The 24x24 icon is used within the frame and the 32x32 icon is used on the Taskbar. By specifying a larger icon size, it is prominently placed as the top left button and serves as a way to navigate to the home page of the site. In addition, using different .ico files than your site’s main icon will make it easier for your users to quickly identify the tasks in your Jump List.

The back and forward buttons take on the dominant color of the site icon to help re-enforce the site’s branding. In addition, you can override the default and set the color of the navigation buttons displayed inside the browser window for your site. The example below shows how a site can specify a color code to navigation buttons to match the site icon.

By providing a large site icon and customizing the color of the back and forward button, it is clear that the site is the focus. You can even have fun with the navigation button colors to match special occasions or events. The button color is surfaced via HTML meta element. The name of the meta element is msapplication-navbutton-color and the content is a CSS color value.

<meta name="msapplication-navbutton-color" content="red"/>

Sites on the Taskbar bring immediate focus and access to your site, and the browser recedes in the background. By using these APIs you can make your site shine and provide a familiar Windows7 experience for your site. For sample code on how to use these APIs please visit the Test Drive site.

For additional examples on how to add this to your site, you can reference the msSiteMode API Cookbook. We’re looking forward to seeing the kinds of pinned sites developers will create, and please send your feedback on the developer experience for pinned sites.

Israel Hilerio, Ph.D.
Principal Program Manager
Internet Explorer

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Microsoft, it is clear that the future is tighter OS integration with web-browsers, but you have side-stepped the democratic process and decided to thrust upon everybody a one-browser, one-os view of the web that burdens every developer, every web page. camendesign.com/.../stop_this_madness

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  When I pin a site using IE 64bit and then I try to launch it, Internet Explorer crashes :(

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Since the post is about pinned shortcuts I'll ask this here why  cannot tabs be teared off and pasted in IE windows generated by pinned shortcuts, nor vice versa I've already posted a bug report on connect connect.microsoft.com/.../tabs-cannot-be-teared-off-and-pasted-in-ie-windows-generated-by-pinned-shortcuts Is this by design? Thanks

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Meh - very Windows specific / browser specific.  While this is of course your objective, I think I'll be passing this stuff by for quite some time, and see if we can get some more cross-platform way to define these capabilities.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Kudos, pinned sites is just fantastic - with one exception, however: All add-ons seem to be disabled when opening a pinned site! Why was this strange decision made? I frequently use the Snagit toolbar to capture a screen image - and it's gone in every pinned site window!

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Two questions about security: Are all jumplist element required to be on the same domain as the site? Wil the jumplist items (URI's) be checked by the smartscreen filtering?

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  I really wish MSFT would stop posting poor code samples in their documentation. It should be: <meta .../> not <META .../> only HTML coders from 1995 use UPPER CASE TAGS FOR EVERYTHING BECAUSE THEY ARE NOOBS. and while you're at it, please go fix all the MSDN documentation.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Browser/OS integration is, by nature, going to need some aspects that are OS-specific.  However, a lot of the functionality described here could be used on other OSs.  There's no reason, for example, that Firefox couldn't (and I hope they do!) implement this: <link href="http://host/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon"/> <meta name="mozapplication-task" content="name=Task 1;action-uri=http://host/Page1.html;icon-uri=http://host/icon1.ico"/> <meta name="mozapplication-window" content="width=1024;height=768"/> etc. Almost all the concepts presented here (other than, perhaps, ThumbBarButton) are concepts present in other operating systems. All OS's have icons for apps. Windows, Mac, and several window systems for Linux all have context-menu options for applications (think: JumpLists). There's nothing stopping this from becoming a open-standard (unless, patents have been filed). Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera could implement similar features. They'd use the prevalent prefix naming convention (moz, webkit, ms, etc.) until the commonalities can be found amongst them all. Then they would come up with a standard naming convention once the common APIs are decided upon. It parallels how  border-radius evolved (-moz-border-radius, -webkit-border-radius -->  border-radius standard). Even if you couldn't standardize these APIs to work with other platforms, there's still nothing stopping the other browsers from implementing this on Windows. If they did, then it would be a feature that 90% of computer users could use. And that's pretty darn good. I applaud MS for providing the best web app OS-integration system to date (Let's be honest, Chrome and Firefox's add-on weren't very good options).  The fact that they are launching this feature with so many highly trafficked web sites (like 70-something top sites I think?) is evidence of this. Though it'd be nice to see IndexedDB (when better standardized), WebSockets, and WebWorkers to enable really powerful web apps.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Why was this not implemented using an XML record. Something like <msapplication>    <msapplication-content>      <msapplication-content-name>Task 1</msapplication-content-name>      <msapplication-content-action-uri>http://host/Page1.html</msapplication-content-action-uri>      <msapplication-content-icon-uri>http://host/icon1.ico</msapplication-content-icon-uri>   </msapplication-content> </msapplication>

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  so is my seventh win as he requests, but once I open ie9 it does not load the site, the URL is displayed, the cursor is in the shape of the hand but does not show the elements of the site. what do I do?

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  i find ie9 socks proxy not work

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Fixed two broken links in this post.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Hello IE team.. I'm having trouble with javascript based calendar. This calendar doesn't load in IE9. The calendar call Vista-like Ajax Calendar and you can find in this link: dev.base86.com/.../vista-like_ajax_calendar_version_2.html This calendar is based on MooTools Framework (http://mootools.net/) IE9 looks great, I hope that IE team will upgrade more frequently.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  You can find examples of Vista-like Ajax Calendar in the following link: dev.base86.com/.../vista-like_ajax_calendar_version_2

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  without functionality of ff adblock plus + element hiding helper i find it useless

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Oh, right, so we should use the .ico file type to provide differently sized icons in favicon.ico. How about using a vector graphics format, like, say, SVG? So that we don't have to craft a 64x64,48x48 (both for large desktop icons),32x32,24x24, 16x16 and 8x8 .ico file? As for the favicon, have you solved the bug where IE won't load anything other than .ico files? Or download it only if it's expressly required through a LINK tag in the page? Or refuse to download if it's not at the server root? I'm just asking.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  While SVG is very nice, it's very rare that you have something that scales reasonably from 16x16 to 64x64. There's too much loss of detail for that to work. So you have to use multiple images, which is a capability that ICO provides. Additionally, since the Windows Shell requires ICO format, you'd end up needing to convert from SVG to ICO anyway. And assuming you're not just trolling, no, they haven't changed the way that FavIcons work. Probably for exactly that reason-- there's no good reason to.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  IE 9 Beta crashes on launch on Via processors.  Please fix.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  www.windowsitpro.com/.../WinInfo-Short-Takes-Week-of-September-20-2010.aspx "Halo: Reach Makes $200 Million in First Day ... Which means that it just needs to be on the market for another two months to make back its development budget" MICROSOFT SPENT $12 BILLION DEVELOPING HALO: REACH?! :O :O :O Love to know how much is spent on things like Office and Windows.  Why ain't this comany backrupt by now? P.S. sorry to be off-post but needed to share it somewhere!

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  @howmuch: Further proof that you shouldn't believe everything (anything?) you read on the Internet. Microsoft doesn't spend $12B on anything.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  @Miguel.... dev.base86.com/.../vista-like_ajax_calendar_version_2.html I get this message from your site when using IE9 Beta... This website is not optimized for your browser, because your browser, Internet Explorer 6.0, is old and therefor lacks many standard features. We recommend that you either use Firefox or upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Firefox is faster, more secure, and fully customizable to suit your online life.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  That pinning thing breaks drag-n-drop when one drags URL from the address bar to create shortcut on the desktop (or any other Explorer folder) - right now shortcut is being created, but then tab immediately closes and re-launches as a pinned site. I believe the old behavior should still be there when drop target is a regular folder.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Need option to toggle saving dragged URLs as .url files instead of .website

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  @Ricardo @Alex I think if you hold down the shift key while dragging & dropping you get the behavior you're looking for.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  It's very nice to see Microsoft integrating webapps into their OS. It's a bit unfortunate that they use Microsoft specific code and didn't think of a way that other browsers and OS's could use. Why call it <meta name="msapplication-navbutton-color" content="red"/> And not <meta name="theme-foreground-color" content="red"/> It's more generic, more future compatible and more friendlier to other browsers. I also agree with a others that the meta tag syntax is really ugly. <META name="msapplication-task" content="name=Task 1;action-uri=http://host/Page1.html;icon-uri=http://host/icon1.ico"/> What if you want to add another ten properties in the future? Why not use RSS to fill the menu? Microsoft should know better.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  @Pablo: Which site caused your crash?

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Please change the way it's implemented. Stop the <meta> madness, instead use a <link> tag to add the properties. Example: <link rel="os-integration" href="os-links.xml"/> where the os-links.xml could contain the actual static items. How much bandwidth do you think this will cost if implemented with <meta> ? Even more so if it's on every page requested, versus only 1 xml file that can be easily cached.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  @Phoenix Good idea, that would make this a lot easier to manage and should save bandwidth as you say.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  Yeah, I agree with Phoenix. It really annoys me that I need to implement all the 'webapp' information into every single page. There is no reason and no good usecase for this ('webapp' information is site-specific not page-specific) and produces a massive overhead. I'd rather like to see something like <link rel="webapp" href="/.well-known/webapp.js" /> (JSON or JS or XML, plus RFC5785 thus you don't need to specify a URI in every file at all – tools.ietf.org/.../rfc5785). Having the specs as JS even allows you to implement the non-static features (play, pause, like, etc.) when running the JS in the page context (though it might actually be better to have this feature page-specific thus only the static features are described in the linked file).

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  @Rob I´m not the owner of the site I was just testing things... I don't even know if the examples open in IE9 ( dev.base86.com/.../vista-like_ajax_calendar_version_2.html )...   If you are web developer download the calendar and mootools and try to use on html webpage...

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2010
  This is very exciting stuff, I particularly like the Outlook Web Access - it's a perfect example of a "site as application" and how jumplist blurs the border between OWA and real Outlook. Makes me want to upgrade to Windows 7! Great job.

• Anonymous
  September 18, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 18, 2010
  Pins? No no no...QUICK LAUNCH, because it's more 100% useful and 100% less confusing. Pins seem to be a copy of the OS X doc feature which is like their version of Quick Launch and the start menu combined...only it takes up too much space by default. Instead of messing around with a Windows 7 only feature that if it does become useful will be dropped by the Windows team (since that's all they seem to be good at doing starting with Vista) that you guys stick to fixing stuff that really matters? The "clean new design" known as IE9's GUI is a total disaster for both non-technical users and technical users. Sure the speed and standards compliance have improved dramatically though you guys have to stop copying other companies and start listening to users on topics BESIDES standards compliance. Want to copy something? Copy the idea behind Firefox, why? Because Firefox was about putting the Gecko rendering engine inside of a CUSTOMIZABLE browser. THAT is the key to it's success although it seems there are plenty of people wasting time over at Mozilla trying to merge extensions in to the browser instead of fixing bugs. That has slowed development down and wasted a lot of people's time. IE team, are you folks listening to feedback about things besides standards compliance?

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2010
  "Look at IE9, we're being really good for standards and we'll show you how bad everyone else is at conforming... BTW, we've added these bunch of non-standard features because we /really/ need them and if you use a browser which is standards compliant you wouldn't want them anyhow." There have been a lot of posts on the blog saying how nice and standards compliant that the browser is, and how the team is working with the other browser developers and standards groups. That makes me feel good. But then to come along and announce a new, non-standard things, it wipes away a lot of good feeling. Any reassuring words about how you're working with the other browser developers to fit this in to their environments, and how it's expected to function in the future ? 16x16 .ico files ? kinda feels as shortsighted as the favicon.ico was - non-scaleable, and only intended as a leveraging feature for the Windows environment.

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2010
  Justin, the point is that it's not a "16x16 .ico file" it's an Icon file with multiple resolutions. There's no other image file type that would work better to carry multiple sizes in a single file.

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2010
  For all ofyou complaining about Microsoft adding non-standard features into IE9 take a steo back and realize that EVERY BROWSER HAS NON-STANDARD FEATURES!!!!  Chome will sync your bookmarks, there is no standard based around that.  Firefox and Chrom both can create application shortcuts, there is no standard around that.  There is nothinbg wrong with having non-standards features.  If you don't want them, don't use them.  Keep in minf that at one time Microsoft added a non standard feature into their browser called AJAX ... guess what it is now a standards.  Stop complaining just for the sake of complaining about IE.

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2010
  Site pinning simply doesn't work while the taskbar pinned to the left side of the screen. All was fixed by moving the taskbar to the bottom of the screen. But left side is very preferrable on widescreen.

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  @Akzhan: As noted in the blog post: "people who have the taskbar position to the left, right, or top of the screen, can drag the favicon on the IE address bar and drop it on the taskbar to pin a site."

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  @gawicks: Tabs running from the same pinned site group belong to different frame processes.  This is how we achieve our site isolation.  That is the reason why you cannot take one tab running on a pinned site and migrate it to another tab running on a separate pinned site.  This is by design.

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  @teacher: The reason Add-ons don't run on pinned sites is that we wanted to remove any non-site specific extension points (like toolbars and BHOs) from altering the original browsing experience created by the site.

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  @badger, @hAl: As badger mentioned having meta-tags that point to any arbitrary site, as a Jump List task, is safe as it is similar to clicking on a webpage link.  However, this is different for our JS APIs.  Our JS APIs implement a same domain policy check that is based on the domain of the start URL for the pinned site.

• Anonymous
  September 20, 2010
  @badger: We use the same caching policies as the IE browser. You may want to clear your cache, reload the page, and see if the tasks are updated.  FYI, meta-tags are read when the page is loaded but are not pushed to the Jump List Tasks until the browser session is closed. The next time you access the Jump List tasks, you should see the new changes.  Let us know if that is not the case.

• Anonymous
  September 21, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 22, 2010
  Meta elements were chosen to represent Jump List Tasks because they provide a way to associate generic site destinations with a document without having to display them. They help us to define information on the page that is parsed but can be ignored if the site is not pinned. They also provide a mechanism to define site installation data that can be used by a user driven installation as well as an API installation. We're not the first company to use meta-tags to surface non-standard functionality, Google uses meta tags to control specific search engine crawling and indexing.

• Anonymous
  September 23, 2010
  It is extremely important for there to be some control over plugin loading for apps.  For enterprise situations we have auth plugins that are inhouse and would love to use the new integrated web app features but if web apps offer less and not more support than a normal browsing session it is useless for our enterprise enviroment.

• Anonymous
  September 23, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2010
  How many items can you have in jump list? the cookbook says 20 but I am unable to get past 5. Can I see an example where it is more than 5?

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2010
  @CvP We only support up to 5 Tasks on a Jump List.  Not sure if that is what you're seeing.  However, we do support up to 20 Jump List items on a Custom Category in the JumpList.  The taskbar ultimately controls the number of Jump List items you are able to see.  In addition, the Customize Start Menu dialog provides some defaults for the max number of items you're able to see on a Jump List (i.e. Number of recent items to display in Jump Lists).

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2010
  @Israelh Thanks. I was talking about custom category in jumplist. The problem was in taskbar configuration. I had it configured to show only 5. The default is 10 it seems. Is there any chance allowing more than one custom category? Having 10 items together doesn't really look good. If I could break them in to 2 parts, 5 in each, it'd look better. also, that way, similar things can be grouped.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  One way to avoid having multiple meta elements on each page is to only define the startURL meta element in all of your webpages.  The webpage that the startURL points to will have all of the other meta elements that define the Pinned Site integration experience.  In addition, this pattern allows sites to standardize the user experience with a consistent start.  This should take care of the meta element duplication that was identified.  Facebook is following this approach today.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  @CvP Thanks for the feedback.  We'll definitely take it into consideration.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  We had spam links in the Start menu (installed by applications) and the desktop. We now get them in the task bar too. The Amazon menu is a particularly good example. IE9 designers, I thought following the IE9 blog that you had understood that you can't trust web/desktop developers. This is a step back.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  META tags were initially designed as a fallback for HTTP headers. Does the new meta values also work as HTTP headers ? Do they also work for local files (file:/// or HTA)? This could be useful for TiddlyWiki.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  @Meta: No, META tags were designed to contain META information about documents. I think you're confused that later on, the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag was created, which, given its name, is obviously a meta tag designed to be used as a HTTP header equivalent. Since Microsoft isn't using HTTP-EQUIV as the name of the tag, they're not saying this is not equivalent to a HTTP header and thus it's only supported as a META tag. @StepBack: I don't think you know what the word "spam" means. If a site  itself cannot opt-in to something, and opting-in requires the USER to do something (which is easily reversed by that same user) then it's not possible to "spam" the system.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2010
  When I saw this news, I was really enthusiastic about pinning. But after reading the comments, I'm no longer. While it's nice that all the jumplist items can be specified on home page only, I fail to see how using a <link> element instead, as suggested by comments here, would be inferior. I believe that <link> is indeed the right way to go. Also, it would be really nice if IE would stop supporting only ICO files for icons. While this format holds the advantage of being able to hold more than one image resource in the same file, I don't see a reason why everyone should be forced to use it.

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2010
  By the way, how is <meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="someURL"> semantically different from <link rel="home" href="someURL" > ? Why not use the element that is already in the standard?

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2010
  I filed this suggestion to Connect: connect.microsoft.com/.../allow-defining-jump-list-items-in-a-separate-file-referenced-by-a-link-element