Such a nice feature, but a horrible, nasty implementation which sadly goes entirely against the grain of where we as an industry should be imploring browser vendors to be going in terms of adding functionality to browsers. The Proprietary way in which this feature is integrated makes me - as someone who writes HTML, and goes to great lengths to make that HTML as succinct and universal as possible - it saddens me that we're again getting into the realms of browser specific code which could be removed in favour of a semantic, browser agonstic, future proof and universal solution as outlined here: camendesign.com/.../stop_this_madness

I really hope this stuff doesn't catch on, because if it does, we'll soon be in the situation where there is more code stuffed into the head of our HTML docs than there is actual content in the body. And all because of a stubborn or perhaps lazy attitude towards playing nice with the internet.

Actually, it's OS specific code - other browsers could surely support jump lists in Win 7.

Yes, it's OS specific, and who's to say another OS maker couldn't implement this? Microsoft's been pretty open as of late.

My main question would be why can't these pinned icons work as RSS readers too? i.e. if I click the subscribe link on the jumplist couldn't the icon change to inform me of unread new items??

Would make this sort of thing a lot more useful for me (been wondering the same thing about the pinned site tiles in WP7).

OS Specific or browser specific, its still the same issue. What if Apple implements their own OS specific way of doing this, and then a linux flavour comes along, and another method is favoured by android phones, and another still by Nokia phones, and yet another still by screen readers, or Internet enabled TVs, or kiosks, or any one of the untold hundreds of unknown devices which connect to the internet now and will do with even greatly frequency in the immediate and distant futures?

There is a bit of HTML which we can use to do this, and it's clean, and easy, and OS and software agnostic. It will work for all of the pieces of software which want to add this feature without having to write software specific code - that's not what the internet is for anymore. That's what I was getting at, that we should be moving away from thinking of the web as the thing we launch our web browsers to look at. This narrow view of what the internet is what helps to produce sloppy short-sighted code like that used to pin sites in IE9. It's a nice feature, but I will not be implementing it in it's current incarnation. I guess some smart alec will write a piece of javascript to spit out that mess of code depending on the user-agent, and a semantic, for-the-internet version for any applications which seek to achieve this and similar features using proper html and a bit of common sense.

And I guess you could say it is similar to vendor specific CSS, but the key difference there is that those vendors are crafting that CSS (generally) with the intention of contributing it back to CSS to support natively. This code for pinned sites isn't like that, it's written with IE - and only IE - in mind, it's not written with that same spirit of universal innovation in mind. There's nothing wrong with adding new features to HTML, it's a great idea, we'd never have had images on the web were it not for this very thing, but we should have learnt our lesson by now that for things to work, they have to work for everyone, not just the X% of people using browser Y or  operating system Z.