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The new Internet Explorer 9 sees Microsoft doing a lot of catching up with other web browsers, but IE9 does have a few innovative features that you won't find elsewhere just yet. Perhaps the most useful of these is the new "pinned sites" feature.
Pinned sites in IE9 are a bit like bookmarks for your taskbar -- handy for frequently used websites or online applications. Naturally, since there is limited real estate in your taskbar, you don't want to put everything in there, but for sites you visit everyday the shortcuts can save you time.
Here's our guide to getting the most out of IE9's pinned sites.
## Drag and Drop Simple
To pin a website to your task bar just launch IE9 and point it to the site you'd like to pin. Once the site has loaded grab the tab and drag it down to the taskbar. That's it. The site now lives in your task bar. To return to that site just click the taskbar button and you'll go directly there.
Any time you you open a browser window from one of your pinned sites you'll notice that there's a small site icon to the left of the back and forward buttons. If you browse away from the pinned site, the icon serves as a quick link to snap you back to where you started.
If you ever want to get rid of a pinned site in your taskbar, just right-click the icon and choose: "Unpin this program from taskbar."
Here's a power user tip: pinned sites aren't just for the taskbar. In fact pinned sites work anywhere in the file system. That's good news for Vista users who can't pin sites to their taskbar, but can add them to the start menu using the same drag-and-drop technique.
## Extra Features
While pinned sites are handy in Windows 7 the real power comes when websites integrate Microsoft's new pinned sites code into their webpages. Using a few (non-standard) lines of code, sites can include their entire menu in the task bar's jump list. Even better sites can use the pinned icon as a message indicator (for example, flash the task bar when a new message arrives on Facebook), or even add Play/Pause buttons to the icon's preview window if there is audio or video content on the page.
Of course not every website supports pinned sites, especially since it only works in IE, which, despite the new release, is still losing market share. However, some popular sites have jumped on board, including favorites like Twitter, which offers a jump list for quick access to New Tweet, Messages, Mentions, Favorites and Search, and Facebook which offers similar links and will also notify you of new messages by flashing the taskbar icon.
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