Pinned Sites in Windows 8

The Windows 8 Start screen is the best place to find and stay connected to all your favorite apps and content. App tiles are alive with activity and show you fresh and tailored content so you know what’s new in your world.

We’ve written about Internet Explorer 10’s Metro style browsing experience on Windows 8. This post describes in detail IE10’s pinned sites and their availability on the Windows 8 Start screen—complete with site-centric visuals and badge notifications to let you know there is new content. We’ll also walk through the Web developer details to support pinned sites.

The following video shows pinned sites in action on Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

Pinned Sites in Windows 8

Pinned Sites – More than Favorites

Consumers on Windows spend most of their time on the Web and we know from Windows opt-in telemetry (officially, the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program), that they go back to the same set of sites time and again. Pinned sites on Windows 8 make it fast and easy to immediately get to your sites. With badge notifications, site tiles come alive with up-to-date information and help you know when new content is available.

Developers can utilize pinned sites to better connect their site with their users and promote their site’s brand directly in the Windows start screen. We found that sites that used this feature with IE9 on Windows 7 see anywhere from a 15 percent to 50 percent increase in site visits. In Windows 8 the experience for consumers is even better with site tile updates, even when you don’t have the site open in the browser.

The following two screen shots illustrate pinned site tiles and badge notifications.

Pinned sites on the Start screen showing site-centric visuals and badge notifications

Example of a badge notification on a pinned site’s tile

Site-Centric Visual on the Pinned Site Tile

As a Web developer, you can provide a site icon (favicon) that IE10 uses throughout the browser to represent the site, in the address bar, on the new tab page, and on the Start screen. IE10 uses the large site icon (32 x 32 pixels) to identify the site when pinned to the Start screen the same way that IE9 used it for pinning to the task bar.

Screen shot of pinning a site with Metro style IE10 showing a preview of the site’s tile

IE10 extracts the dominant color from the icon and automatically uses it as the background color for the Start screen tile.

One tool for creating icons is x-icon editor. Use it to create the 32x32 icon for your site. It can also convert an image to the icon file format (.ico). Then associate the .ico using traditional favicon markup:

<link href="testdrive.ico" rel="shortcut icon" />

Badge Notifications That Update In the Background

Windows 8 can poll for updates for pinned tiles on the Start screen. This works well for lightweight notifications such as new messages from other users (email & social networking), new discounts on a shopping site, new articles on a newsfeed etc.

With Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8, you can offer badge notifications directly on your pinned site tiles. This means users get updates to their sites without the site being open in the browser. As an example, pin the Fresh Tweets demo using IE10 on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The pinned site tile updates on a regular basis and notifies the user when there are new tweets available.

Background notifications require site-provided components. These are: (1) Badge Notification XML, an XML response that describes the badge notification for Windows, and (2) Pinned Site Meta Tags, Web page markup that points to the location which Windows should poll for notifications and the frequency of polling.

Badge Notification XML

Windows handles the polling and drawing of badge notifications. Windows polls the badge notification XML that describes the visual for the pinned site tile. The badge XML schema defines this simple XML response. For example, to update the tile with the number “3,” you send the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<badge value="3"/>

Badges can be numbers or glyphs, such as ‘alert’ and ‘new message’ indicators. For a full list of what a badge can display, see Choosing a badge image on MSDN.

Pinned Site Meta Tags

The next step is associating the badge notification XML to the Web page. IE10 uses the meta tag “application-name” to determine if the Web page supports pinned sites capabilities like notifications and jump lists. To support badge notifications, include a new meta-tag in your markup with the URL of the badge notification XML and the frequency with which Windows should request it. IE checks to see if the “msApplication-badge” meta tag is present on the page at time of pinning, as well as on subsequent launches of the site from the pinned site tile.

<meta name="msapplication-badge" value="frequency=360;polling-uri=https://ietestdrive2.com/PinnedSites/TweetCounter/microsoft/360" />

The value parameter has two parts: polling-uri (required) and frequency (optional).

polling-uri is the absolute URI from which Windows requests the simple XML document defined above.

frequency is an optional number of minutes between updates and must be one of the following values:

• 30 (Windows will poll the URI every 30 minutes)
• 60 (1 hour)
• 360 (6 hours)
• 720 (12 hours)
• 1440 (1 day. This is the default.)

If frequency is omitted or has a value other than one listed above, it defaults to daily updates (1440 minutes).

Developer APIs for updating Badge Notifications

You can also clear and refresh the site tile badge from the Web page directly to ensure that the site tile is up-to-date.

When a user launches the pinned site tile through the Start screen, the Web site is running in its own session called SiteMode and can use the following JavaScript functions to update the badge.

window.external.msSiteModeClearBadge() clears the badge notification on the tile. In the Fresh Tweets demo, when the user receives a notification and taps on the tile to launch the browser, the Web page uses msSiteModeClearBadge() to clear the notification from the tile. The next time the tile lights up with a badge update, the user knows there is new content.

window.external.msSiteModeRefreshBadge() calls Windows to update the badge on the site using the polling URI. As an example, the user sees a pinned site tile indicating three unread messages and clicks on the tile to return to the site. If he or she reads only the first update, you can trigger an update so the badge reflects the correct read/unread count of two.

In Windows 8 Consumer Preview, these two APIs only function on sites running in the Local intranet or Trusted sites zones. This will be fixed in the next preview. To test these APIs in the Consumer Preview on your own site, add its domain to the Trusted sites list using the Security tab of the Internet Properties dialog.

Desktop Taskbar Notifications

Notifications that appear as icon overlays for pinned sites on the desktop taskbar will continue to work for Windows 8 and IE10 on the desktop. This form of notification is not available on the pinned site for the Windows 8 Start screen. Windows 8 handles notifications for all tiles on the Start screen and does so in a battery-efficient way.

Jump Lists to Quickly Navigate Within the Site

Many top sites such as NYTimes.com, CNN.com, and Amazon.com support IE9 pinned sites features such as jump lists to get to a specific task or part of a site. With IE10, jump lists are available as part of the navigation bar for a touch-friendly way to navigate the site.

When the user launches the site from the Start screen, the pin button shows that there are jump lists available for this site:

Screen shot showing the Fresh Tweets Demo’s jump list

The jump list displayed is the same as IE9 displays on the Windows 7 taskbar.

You can add static tasks to your site’s jump list via page markup (learn more) or dynamically based on user interactions (learn more). Badge and jump lists in Windows 8 are a site-centric feature. Each fully qualified domain name can have one and only one set of polling data and jump list data.

Conclusion

Internet Explorer 10 puts sites at the center of the experience through integration with the Windows 8 Start screen. Web developers can create site-centric visuals for pinned site tiles, share when there are new updates available for the site, and offer jump lists to navigate quickly around the site.

We look forward to you adding these simple features to your Web site to maximize their impact in Windows 8.

—Rahul Lalmalani, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  Why reinvent the wheel with an msapplication tile tag and not just poll for rss feed titles?

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  The icon that appears on the pinned sites badges look really dinky. The icon is too small compared to standard or app tiles.

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  As a web developer this is horribly depressing.  The best options we get is a tiny icon in brand colours, and a tiny badge?  You couldn't give us some user opted-in live tile functionality?  A life tile could be a mini-webpage!  Or we could at least get full icon control.  But no, this is what you give us? I was looking forward to Windows 8.  I was looking forward to an Operating System that embraced native applications and would help herald in the web as the future of the application platform.  But this just isn't good enough. If you want me to even consider not being a loyal Google user, you're going to have to do better than this.  Step up your game, Microsoft.  You were so close.  So very close.

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  Microsoft is still use their own private method (API) on IE 10. ***!

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  I agree with pmbAustin.

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  Opera has something similar, which you could have implemented: dev.opera.com/.../opera-speed-dial-enhancements

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  Love to see the video, but it isn't showing: "No video with supported format and MIME type found"

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  Follow-up with @Navarr comment above, I just want to confirm. So there is no way to update the favicon with certain frequency??

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  @ pmbAustin With hundreds of favorites I can understand that pinned sites are not the way to go. I am curious however that you do not use the information presented in the previous post to make D-IE your browser of choice (there is even the F11 button if you want a chrome-less experience) and ignore M-IE completely. The inclusion of both D-IE and M-IE in context with the choices you can make as to which one you want to use gives you all the choices you need. For those that have come to value the feature of pinned sites they are there for their use, and for those that prefer the favorites, they are still there and nothing has changed (except for the fact that you have to invest 20 seconds to change the settings as described in the previous post). Harry

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  Agree with a lot of the comments here so far... 32x32 icons on pinned web pages is ugly and makes me think Windows 3.1. I would expect a full tile image design space for web pages just like installed apps... or a screenshot like Windows Phone with an arbitrary small notification overlay. Pinned web pages not being "live" might be a reasonable trade-off vs. a Win8-style application, but ugly icons is going to dissuade me from pinning web pages to my beautiful new start screen!

• Anonymous
  April 03, 2012
  EPIC FAIL. favicons for websites are 16x16px by default... 32x32 favicons are scaled to fit (with significant loss of picture quality and detail).  If you want to add a NEW icon for a website, you need to add a NEW tag! or an additional attribute to define its use (NO EXCEPTIONS!) Stop breaking the web Microsoft! you've done enough damage already! ++++++++++++++++++++* And for crying out loud... who the !@#$@#!@ do we have to talk to to get you to fix the comment form on this blog?!?!?! its @#$%@#$@ annoying that it never, ever !@#$@#$@@# works! If you forget to copy your comment to the clipboard first you lose EVERYTHING!!!! - worst comment form I have ever used on any site in over TEN !@#$@#$@ YEARS!!!!!!!! ++++++++++++++++++++*

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  Well, I have to admit I dont like the small 32*32 lighter square in the big square. Use a glow effect on the icon if you want but, please, forget that ugly small square. Also, why couldn't websites have a fullsize logo for Windows 8 like on the iPhone?

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  Pinned is great for frequently used sites. I'd actually be open to a feature to have IE auto pin (and obviously auto unpin) frequented sites. But what's missing is a way to store non-frequent/favorite sites. They're known as bookmarks in every other browser. A website I know I'll want to visit in the future, as some type of reference.

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  tiny icons...do not look good.

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  Why not use the apple-touch-icon? That's already in place on many websites.

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  It would be great if you could use the website screen capture as tile image, along with the favicon and badge (if any), using the Windows.UI.Notifications.TileTemplateType.tileSquareImage template [[ msdn.microsoft.com/.../windows.ui.notifications.tiletemplatetype.aspx ]] You could refresh the site view every time the user navigate to it (this is cheap in computer resources, since you have to render the site anyway) and maybe once a day, too. But, if you do so, please, don't update the tile if the website did load through a redirection (to avoid to use "login wifi pages" as tile image). It seems relatively easy to implement, and it's a nice way to represent a website. We usually remember the look of the website we would like to go to.

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2012
  Very limited. Disappointing

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2012
  All touch displays have problem with Drop-down menus. 131.0.img98.net/.../i280509_untitled.png

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2012
  @pmbAustin - I'm not sure what browser you use but the comment entered in the form most definitely does get lost upon unsuccessful submission. (at least in Chrome and Firefox from my tests) There's over 5 or 6 years worth of comments by readers complaining about this problem on this blog.  It isn't new.  The problem is well known.  As is the solution.  However Microsoft insists on trying to use broken blog software because it was built using ASP technology. Hang your tail between your legs microsoft and install ANY version of ANY blog software available today... PHP, Python, Wordpress, JSP, ColdFusion, whatever - but don't ever make the same mistake twice of using legacy ASP postback pages.  They don't work and this comment form just causes developers that use it more frustration targeted at Microsoft every time they try to use it. I think we should start an online protest on this blog until this is resolved. Everyone post (as often as you can, on every single blog entry) "Please Fix This Comment Form Microsoft!  We will not post any further questions and topical comments until the problem has been addressed!"

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2012
  @Harry Richter Correct me if I am wrong: I believe there is no D-IE on Arm tablets? So for WOA users there is no way to organize their favorites similiar to the desktop version. Having hundreds of favorites myself I can see another huge pitfall here. One could argue that you would never have this number of favorites on your tablet. But the new options to synch setting via the cloud between different machines, could easily result inhaving all your desktop favorites in an unorganized manner on your tablet. No favorites for M-IE is definetly not the right choice.

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2012
  ok

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 08, 2012
  Why add all this burden on developers? Really? Allow us to specify an RSS feed to poll. RSS also has a field already to specify the polling time. It makes me sad that this is the best you can do; inelegant, and a burden to developers, companies, users and your staff.

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2012
  Please ms, implement w3c gamepad api !

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2012
  @Darren - you've found on the key stumbling block in Microsoft's strategy for design.  They base a lot of decisions on "Telemetry Data".  However there is a fundamental flaw in this. Your Telemetry Data will only show you what (A) users that had it turned on did (e.g. the ones that don't care about security, privacy and customizing their PC)  (B) data for DESKTOP usage only... which is 1,000% different than how users use tablets and (C) only shows what users had access to.  e.g. if the users didn't have a good or better way to do something they HAD TO USE inferior features and options provided in existing Microsoft products. It's like giving people an option to eat either a boiled ham sandwich, garbage, or cat food.  Your Telemetry data will show that a whopping 97% of users chose to eat the "boiled ham sandwich".  Microsoft would read this data to believe that almost everyone loves the boiled ham sandwich!  What is obviously missing is that NO OTHER CHOICES were available - thus you don't get any data for people that love salads, BBQ, steak, Chicken on a Kaiser, pasta, stir-fry, noodles, soup, etc. As far as ARM goes - it has been well documented in the tech community... for a tablet experience, ARM provides awesome hardware specs... however attempting to duct tape on a full Windows desktop OS (with no application compatibility) is an epic failure in the making that will affect all windows tablets. If I was in management at MSFT I would can this project ASAP before any more damage is done.

• Anonymous
  April 10, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 12, 2012
  Jeez, if I was a Microsoft employee, I'd quickly learn to avoid reading the comments on blog posts. ...But, at the risk of bandwagoning, as pretty much any web developer would tell you, this is a horribly inadequate solution. Tiny branding for a huge tile without updating, and more proprietary tags and API calls. Hate it.