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Can you make IE8 taskbar in Win7 act like it did in Vista?

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DaveHCYJ

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 18, 2003
Location
San Diego
So I've been using Win7 for a while now and I gave the big-icon,combine-always default taskbar behavior a try for a week or two before I changed it to big-icon,combine-only-when-taskbar-is-full behavior so that it would be more like vista. (I know you can set it to small icon to get even more vista like, but I actually like the big icon)

I've been using the big-icon,combine-only-when-taskbar-is-full setting for about two weeks now and one thing is driving me absolutely mad, and that is how IE8 behaves.
Under Vista:
I like to organize my internet browsing. For example, I might have 3 seperate IE windows up. In the first window I'll have my e-mail, facebook, etc. in tabs. In the second window I'll have ocforums, cnn, blogs, etc. in tabs. And in the third window I'll have amazon, newegg, etc. Using this setup under vista I could quickly get to the subset of internet sites I was interested in with a single click on the taskbar. So if I'm working in excel and I want to do something social I click my "social" IE window and up it pops with just the 3 tabs I want.
The problem with Win7:
In Windows 7 I can still have 3 separate IE windows to organize my tabs, but I no longer have 1 click access to them. In Win7 when you click any IE8 on the taskbar you get a minihover popup for ALL of your open tabs from Every IE8 window, not just the IE8 window you clicked on. In addition you then have to move your mouse up to this minihover preview area and find the one of the tabs in the IE8 window you are trying to get to pop up and click a second time to get it to maximize.

Is there anyway to customize/change back this behavior in Win7?

Also, no I haven't tried firefox to see if it does the same thing, but to preempt that response I prefer IE8 because I like the shift-enter functionality in the address bar and I heavily use the accelerators.
 
I'm not sure I follow, if you're using combine when full then there is a spot on the taskbar for each open browser window.

If you click on any of these browser windows on the taskbar, they should open with one click. The minihover pop up only appears if you hover on the browser spot on the taskbar for a split second, which if you're holding the mouse there that long you might as well just have the combined taskbar to single click the pop ups.

Since the taskbar shows all the open tabs if you hover, that probably means you could get to a specific tab faster if you really wanted, but if not you could single click your grouped browser window form the taskbar, and then click the tab you want.

You should have 1 click access to these windows with the setup you're using, I don't see why it wouldn't work that way for you.
 
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Wow do I feel silly. After using it in the "default" mode for so long I trained myself to wait for the pop up. I also just noticed that this is a per user setting and my Admin account still had it set to the "default" mode further confusing myself.
 
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