I noticed the other day that my Windows machine went through a GIANT install —
on the order of the Fall Creators Update: installing a percentage of the update, then
restarting, then installing another percentage, then rebooting.
It turns out it actually was the Fall Creators Update — again. An update
to the update, if you will.
I watched a video that offered a summary of updates, and found one thing that seemed
useful to me directly: the ability to save a link right onto your taskbar.
Yeah, yeah, it had all kinds of other updates to Paint 3D and so on, but I don't
use those. I don't need them in my life right now. But I can get behind the URL thing.
Why? Because as it happens, I have a client for whom I'm doing a lot of work using
a Web form on a specific development server. It'd be nice to have a link to that URL
directly on the taskbar instead of having to open the browser, fight with it while it
tries to load the home page the client has set, to get to the dev box.
Luckily, Microsoft implemented a version of the feature in IE. If I was an Edge user,
I should see the feature shown in the video. The implementation in IE is a little
different. Under Options (the gear icon in the upper right corner) is an option titled
"Add site to Apps." After clicking, I found the shortcut (pictured as the Internet Explorer
"e" logo against a white background) right at the very top of my Start Menu (the first
entry under "Recently Added.") Right-clicking on the menu item gave me the option to
pin it to the taskbar.
You can go as far as view the properties of the shortcut from the taskbar, but
you can't edit the shortcut icon. Somewhat interesting: The shortcut is of a type called
"Pinned Site Shortcut" — not just "Shortcut."
I think it's a nice-to-have feature, because it keeps shortcuts off of my desktop
and down on the taskbar, where I live. One can create a shortcut on the desktop to an
internet URL, but about the best you could do to get it onto a taskbar in Windows 10
is to pin it to a browser taskbar icon. Not bad, but not quite as handy.