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 visitwww.computershopper.com, you can type just Google 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.