IE8 Download Notification in Windows 7
Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Internet, MVP10, Windows | Posted on 15-09-2009
Ever started a download and then wondered how much time it had before it finished? Me too. I just noticed this feature in the new taskbar of Windows 7 on the Internet Explorer 8 icon.
Zune 4.0 was just released so I kicked off a download. A few minutes later I was wondering how far along it was.
I happened to glance down at the task bar in Windows 7 and noticed this:
The Internet Explorer 8 icon was filling up, moving to the right as the download progressed. Here is typical download window. Very cool and something I hadn’t noticed before nor seen anyone mention on the Internets.
Good to know and a nice use of the new task bar, I mean dock, I mean task bar in Windows 7.
@jason
By default all downloads are saved in the Downloads folder. Open the file explorer icon on the task bar and just search for zune you’ll find it that way as well.
Ok this is exciting but how do you find your Zune setup package once it is downloaded if you happened to click “Close this dialog box when download completes”? You cannot see the full path there in the screenshot you provided.
As far as I can find there is no list of downloads in IE Explorer 8.
I actually looked up the help in IE 8 on this and under the heading “Find a file you have downloaded”, help said, “Click the Start button , and then click either Documents or Pictures.” That’s it!
Ok now someone will say, “You should know where you have downloaded stuff”, but this is for the users I support, not me and they don’t always know where they downloaded stuff to. And anyway that argument is putting the onus back on the user. It is the software makers job to meld software to the user, not the other way around.
Yep, it does it in file copies too, and I believe the troubleshooting wizards. It’s an API and you can hook into it easily using .Net managed code using the Windows 7 Code Pack.
You just tell Windows what your window’s progress is (it doesn’t infer from any progress bars on the screen; it lets you determine it programmatically.)