Exploring the Internet Explorer 10 Metro-style user interface

In this chapter we're going to focus on Internet Explorer 10. Why? Well, one, because it comes with Windows 8 and two, because there's actually two different versions of Internet Explorer 10 to look at. One, in the metro style, another in the old desktop environment. So let's begin with the tour of the UI of the new Internet Explorer 10 in the Metro style which has a tile right here on the start screen. Clicking this tile will launch IE10 and you're going to see a number of differences from what you're used to seeing in Internet Explorer.

One, as you look across the top, you don't see a title bar, a menu bar, favorites, et cetera. All you're going to see is your home page. Down at the bottom is where you're going to see the address bar and you're also going to see a series of buttons. One for navigating. So if you start moving through various sites, you can move back using the Back button. Over here to the right, you'll notice a Refresh button to refresh any page that you're looking at. Then the push pin button which actually allows you to pin this site to a couple of different locations.

You can pin it to the start screen itself. You can also pin it to the taskbar. Next, you'll see a wrench. This is where you go to access Page tools, and then at the very far right you'll see a button for moving forward through pages. So if we wanted to go to lynda.com, we could just click in the address bar, and what's going to happen is you're going to see some frequent sites and favorite sites pop up. This is how you get to those sites. Now I don't see lynda.com as one of my frequent or favorite sites. So I need to type it in.

Now when I press Enter on the keyboard, I'll be taken to that site. Notice that I do have a back button now that is usable. So I can go back to the site I was at. I also have, if we move up into the page itself, arrows that appear on the left and on the right-hand side for navigating back and forward. Now if we don't have a page to move forward to, we won't see the arrow on the right side, but we can definitely go back using the arrow on the left side. Let's do that. It'll take you back to your home page and now as we move to the right-hand side, there's the arrow that will allow us to move forward to the page we were just at.

So that's a quick look at the UI. Notice it's very clean, there's not a lot going on. Of course, it's a lot different when we go to our old desktop environment and look at Internet Explorer there. So that's what we're going to do next. Let's just close this up by moving to the very top when you see the hand, click, drag it straight down to the bottom, and release, and we'll continue from here.