IE 10: Metro style browsing - one engine, two experiences | Hacker News Reader

IE 10: Metro style browsing - one engine, two experiences

blogs.msdn.com

46 pointspcj18 comments

I'm running into an issue while in the Desktop where links open in the Metro IE, instead of Desktop IE. WTF? So I'm constantly switching back and forth between Metro and Desktop. The fullscreen flip animation is very jarring, not to mention tedious.

Besides that, my biggest complaint would have to be the Metro experience on a non-touch device. I feel so lost. I'm just pressing keys hoping it'll activate a Metro shortcut. Right click, Windows button, Alt-tab, Windows-tab, etc... Trackpad doesn't support multi-touch, so scrolling is awkward.

As an experienced windows user, I too feel that the experience was interesting. the metro UI is so inviting to touch that it feels odd navigating it with mouse. Nothing I could not get used to but it feels like a little bump in the road for sure.

Yes, it does feel like Metro will quickly become tiring and frustrating - like you have to perform too many actions to get somewhere or get something done. Plus, all those big different colors on one screen - It doesn't feel like a design best practice at all.

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

Having played with Windows 8 on a PC with a trackpad, Metro gets old really, really fast.

If they keep both the desktop and Metro in Windows 8, this will be a huge failure.

They need to choose one for each type of device: Desktop for PCs, Metro for tablets.

I'm running into an issue while in the Desktop where links open in the Metro IE, instead of Desktop IE.

This they have to fix. I imagine they will. The only way to go from "classic" back to Metro is either by opening a Metro app (not IE) or by explicitly invoking Metro. Otherwise you should stay in "classic".

Go to the control panel and open the "default programs" and set the desktop version to have all the defaults. I did this for Firefox.

You can control this setting from the Metro IE Settings charm:

-Launch Metro IE

-Activate the Settings Charm

-Click "Default View for Links" and toggle the default.

I just realized a major advantage that the Metro IE will have over the Desktop IE. If you're using Metro, software packages won't be able to install their crappy (and/or spyware) toolbars in people's browsers all the time.

The biggest difference is that Metro IE doesn't support Flash/Silverlight/plugins and desktop IE does. This is, I suspect, why they put a 'switch to desktop IE' feature into Metro IE. Site's broken? Just flip to the full version.

do you know how to switch from desktop to metro? when ever i open ie, it just opens desktop, and i haven't had a chance to even LOOK at metro ie. all my links go to the desktop version, on start, and the taskbar both.

one engine, two skins. but the real question is will that engine be any good, and are they going to attempt to compete at all with mozilla and chrome's accelerated release schedules?

i don't care how awesome the browser's UI is, can it properly display the UI of the websites i am trying to view?

IE 10 is a pretty solid browser. It's fast, it covers huge swaths of CSS3 including animations, hyphenations, transforms, and more, it supports HTML5 very well. In fact, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are a fully supported way to write full-blown Windows 8 Metro apps, and MS is showing how serious they are by having written nearly every single example Windows 8 app as an HTML5 app. To be honest, it feels a lot like webOS.

MS is really serious this time around. I think writing IE off at this point would be short-sighted.

But weren't all those available like a year ago in Chrome and Firefox? And Windows 8 with IE10 won't be available until late next year.

You're right of course, Chrome broken the ground and Firefox followed, the constant behind the scenes update model is the way we're going to be expecting all software to work soon.

Unfortunately this doesn't fit well with enterprise customers who are stuck remembering the days of updates breaking all their internal apps and being told by their incompetent IT departments it'll take 3 months to fix.

IE is in a bit of a tricky place for MS.

Which website are you trying to view that does not get rendered as expected on IE10? Which CSS/HTML feature you expected that is lacking?

I see a lot of such unqualified general opinions here on HN that rant against a particular product/technology without any specificity. It will genuinely help to give a speciic and concrete feedback otherwise its just noise.

what' he's referring to, in my experience is the fact that microsoft has been trumpeting IE and HTML5 for some time (particularly on windows 7 phone). And that except for the hd7s and samsung focus, windows 7 phones are stuck with ie 7 mobile, which has no HTML5 support. From what I can tell other windows 7 phones cannot run the 7.5 "mango" release, which actually includes an HTML5 capable IE browser.

All of the WP7 devices will be able to run Mango. Mango hasn't been released yet for existing phones, but speculation is that it will happen on Sept 23rd. Although I don't know what the roll out will look like.

To be honest it's fairly obvious now why they were doing that, to pave the way for Win 8's HTML5 driven UI. But I guess they just had to ship the phone OS before they could get it ready.

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