Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

IE11 Desktop: The Grand Tour

There’s only one easy way to open the desktop Internet Explorer: Click its icon on the desktop taskbar. It comes preinstalled there.

Now, you might reasonably object: “What’s the big deal? I can always get to it the way I get to any other program: with a quick search at the Start screen.”

But you’d be wrong. Desktop IE is, for some reason, completely invisible to the Search command and does not appear as a tile on the Start screen. The only version you can find by searching, and the only version on the Start screen, is the TileWorld version.

Note

Actually, you can pin desktop IE to the Start screen. Open a Windows Explorer window at the desktop. Open your Computer→Program Files→Internet Explorer window. Right-click the icon called iexplore.exe; from the shortcut menu, choose Pin to Start.

And there you go. Your desktop IE, called “iexplore,” appears as a tile at the right end of the Start screen. Now you can select it or even search for it (although you have to use its Windows name, iexplore).

There’s one other sneaky way to open desktop IE, one that may actually be quicker sometimes. Just type a Web address—a URL (Uniform Resource Locator)—into any Explorer window’s address bar, and then hit Enter. Desktop IE opens automatically and pulls up that page. (A Web page URL usually begins with the prefix http://, but you can leave that part off when typing into the address bar.)

Figure 15-1. The Internet Explorer window offers tools and features that let you navigate ...