Recently Microsoft finally released their latest browser. Apart from all of the techie stuff like standards and speed, there are some great improvements.  Particularly for Windows 7 users and some of these features we think the other browsers and OS (Operating systems like OSX and Linux) will soon implement.

These all centre on “Jump Lists”. Basically in Windows 7 you can “Pin” a program to your taskbar and then right click it to see a list of common tasks. So in Word you get a list of the recent documents you’ve opened, other browsers such as Google Chrome show you most visited sites and recently closed tabs – pretty useful if you’ve just closed something you actually wanted to keep!

What IE9 allows us to do is drag the website to the taskbar and create our own “pinned” item with Jump lists. So in relation to our specialist issue tracking tool, we’ve added a few quick links to so users can jump straight to the list of issues or straight to a page were they can add the issues.

Adding these jump lists isn’t days of work and I think will start to become common place across browsers and operating systems; once you start using them, you realise how useful they really are.

Microsoft has also provided more in depth and complicated options to control these jump lists and allow us to create categories and special preview windows all of which will be useful for the ever-growing world of the internet.

At juicy we’re already well involved with deploying IE9 jump list options onto some of our client’s sites in preparation for early adopters and the general public in a few weeks. We are a full service agency and we can help you achieve your development goals through smart business process design and speedy development.

There is one flaw, you do need Windows 7 to even install IE 9 and get these options but this is certainly the future…