Launch Web pages straight from the taskbar

If you’re an all-day Web user—constantly jumping online in the midst of other tasks—you probably do a frequent two-step you might call the IE Shuffle (substitute “Firefox,” “Opera,” or “Chrome,” if you’re so inclined): Find your open browser or its launch icon (perhaps buried behind open windows or sitting on the Windows Desktop somewhere), launch it or maximize it, and enter your destination address in the address bar.

Not exactly a terrible hardship, but Windows 7 can save you some steps by letting you install a miniature address bar right in the taskbar. When you type an address into it, it launches a browser window and goes directly to that site. Handy! It also works with the uber-useful browser shortcut domain-name-plus-Ctrl + Enter. So, for example, if you want to visit www.computershopper.com, you can type just computershopper in this mini-address bar, then press Ctrl + Enter. The browser will autofill the “www.” and the “.com,” just like it would in your main browser window.

The address-bar-in-the-taskbar isn’t active by default, though. To set it up, right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the now-familiar Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off Address, then hit OK. Here's the dialog box:

You’ll now see the miniature address bar in the taskbar. It looks like this:
 

Enter a Web address, and Windows 7 will launch a browser window, already headed to your Web destination. Of course, this is Microsoft here, so this works by default with Internet Explorer 8, assuming that IE8 is set as your default browser. If you want to use the taskbar address window with another browser, you’ll have to set that one as your default.

Miss your old taskbar buttons? Revert ’em

For the first few weeks we spent with Windows 7, we stumbled around the new default taskbar like we were lost in a corn maze. Don’t get us wrong—we like most of the changes to it. But the big graphical icons signifying programs, as opposed to the horizontal-tiles-with-text that we were used to from Windows XP and Vista, made us think twice every time we approached the taskbar region. Was the app launched, or merely pinned to the taskbar?
We’re sure we’ll get the hang of the new taskbar yet, but in the meantime, we poked around and discovered that you can revert things to the way they used to be. (That’s comforting, since that can be said of so few things in life.)

Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties. This launches the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box. (We’ll be coming back to this box more than a few times in this story.) On the Taskbar tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu called Taskbar buttons. We've circled it here:

Windows 7’s default installation has this menu set at Always combine, hide labels. Change the setting to Combine when taskbar is full or Never combine, as you see fit. (Never combine prevents the taskbar from grouping a given program’s multiple windows together when the taskbar gets crowded.) Voila: You’ll see the familiar taskbar buttons of old, replete with text labels.