A web site in Desktop Minder is a file: an internet shortcut, the little .url file that is nothing but an address. It sits in a folder or a launcher with everything else, and opening it opens the site in the View, which for that moment is a browser, with Back, Ahead, Refresh and an ad-blocking switch. This page covers using one, making one, the picture it wears, and the Internet desktop that starts out full of the bookmarks you already had.

A Web Shortcut Is a Document

Double-click a shortcut to a web site, in a launcher pane or in a folder's listing, and it opens in the View the way a folder or a picture does. Nothing else starts up, and you don't leave Desktop Minder. The tab is the shortcut's name, and resting the pointer on it shows the address of the page you are on now (which may not be where the shortcut pointed, once you have followed some links). Unlike the other pages Desktop Minder shows, such as an HTML file or a mail message, a web page here follows its links, because a page you have gone to is a page you may want to go on from. Right-clicking in the page gives the browser's own menu, or the page's, and not Desktop Minder's.

The browser is Microsoft's WebView2, the same engine Edge is built on, which Windows 11 already has.

Browsing in the View

Back, Ahead and Up

Back goes to the page before this one. When there isn't one, Back means the document you had open in this View before the shortcut. Ahead goes the other way. Hold either down, or right-click it, and the pages you have been through unfold as a list, with their titles, so you can jump straight to one. Up, to the right of Ahead, leaves the pages altogether and returns to the document you had open before the site. Only a site has this: a local web page doesn't follow links, so has no pages to go through.

Refresh

The circle of arrows on the bar reloads the page, and so does F5, even when the focus is inside the page. Desktop Minder switches the browser's own keyboard shortcuts off, so the keys belong to the program, and F5 is the program's.

Ad Blocking

The barred circle beside Refresh is the ad-blocking switch. Gray means off; black means on; the tip says which. It starts off, because it is somebody else's code that runs against every page.

What it uses is AdBlock, and what it borrows is Edge's copy of it. Desktop Minder's browser has its own profile, so it can't use the extension that is installed in Edge; it can only load a second copy of the same one. So you need to have AdBlock in Microsoft Edge first. If it isn't there, you are told so and the switch stays off. The first time you turn it on you are asked, because a copy is made of about 300 MB (nearly all of it filter lists), and that takes a moment. After that the switch is instant, the page you are on is loaded again so you see the effect, and it applies to every page shown in the program, the program's own pages included. Turning it off asks first, because the copy is deleted; turning it back on makes it again. The copy is kept on this computer, not in OneDrive, and the on-or-off choice is kept in the registry, so it is a per-computer choice.

Signing In

Sites you sign in to stay signed in, even after the program is closed and started again, and the browser offers to save passwords and fill them in, as Edge does. Mail you receive is the exception: a message is written by strangers, and a form that offers to fill in your password on something a stranger sent is how a phishing page works, so that is turned off there.

If a page starts to make a sound, such as a video or a stream, the Jukebox's player is paused, the same as when you open a film in the View: two things sounding at once is one too many. It stays paused until you start it. Going quiet doesn't start it again.

When You Leave and When You Close

Leaving a site for another document in the same View parks it out of sight, signed in, so Back takes it up just where it was. Only a few are parked at a time (four in a View). Closing the View's tab with its X is different: it lets go of the page entirely, and of every other parked page in that View. That matters because each web page is a whole browser with a family of processes behind it; closing the View is how you give them back. Back after that reopens the page as a new one, so a login or a scroll position isn't kept.

Making a Shortcut

Create Shortcuts, Web Site...

Right-click the background of a folder's listing, or of a launcher pane, where you can write, and choose Create Shortcuts, then Web Site.... A small window asks for two things:

• Address: anything that looks like one. facebook.com will do; it is made whole as https://facebook.com/. If you copied an address before opening the window, it is filled in for you. Something that couldn't be an address (it has spaces, or no dot in the host) is refused with an example.
• Name: what to call the file. Leave it blank and the address names it: www.facebook.com becomes Facebook. Characters a file name can't hold are taken out, and a name already in use gets -1, -2 and so on after it.

What is written is a plain .url file, which is an address and nothing more, so Explorer and every browser understand it too. The same menu has Program..., for a shortcut to a program; see the Launchers page.

Social Sites

On the Apps pane, Create Shortcuts has a third item, Social Sites, which makes shortcuts to fourteen of the usual ones at once: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Substack, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr, Discord and Snapchat. It passes over any you already have, whether the same name or the same address under another name. Delete the ones you don't use like any other file. The Social desktop is the same idea for mail, calendars and contacts: it comes with folders of shortcuts to the web versions of Gmail, Outlook.com and the rest, for the services you would rather use in a page than as a mailbox here. See Desktops.

Copying and Pasting

A shortcut copied from one launcher and pasted plainly into another makes a shortcut to it, not a second copy. That is how every file that launches something behaves in Desktop Minder. The new one wears the same picture as the original. To get a second copy of the file itself, drag it with Ctrl held.

The Picture a Shortcut Wears

The Site's Own Face

A shortcut wears its site's own little icon in a launcher, instead of a browser's. The first time it is drawn, Desktop Minder fetches the icon the site keeps at its root (favicon.ico), or failing that the one the page names for itself, and keeps it on this computer under the site's name, so a site is asked once. A site with no icon is remembered as having none for a day and then tried again, so a slow site doesn't make every listing stall. Nothing waits for it: the listing is drawn first and the face arrives.

Choosing Another Picture

Right-click the shortcut and choose Choose Icon... to give it a picture from the icon gallery, or one of your own. That writes the choice into the .url file, where Explorer would read it too. A picture the shortcut names for itself always wins over everything else.

If you have not chosen one, a shortcut still looks in your icon library (the pictures you have brought in, not the ones that came with the program) for an icon with the right name. It tries the shortcut's own name, so YouTube.url wears YouTube.ico, and then the site's name, so any shortcut to youtube.com, music.youtube.com or amazon.co.uk wears YouTube.ico or Amazon.ico. Nothing is written into the shortcut; the match is made again each time it is drawn. Failing that, it wears the site's own face.

A Struck-Through Face

A launcher pane quietly asks, in the background, whether each site still answers (and not more than once an hour per site). A site that doesn't answer in six seconds, or doesn't exist any more, has its face drawn dimmed with a red ring and slash over it: the universal No. A site that says 404 is a site that is there, so that isn't struck. With no network, nothing is said either way and no face is struck. The shortcut isn't touched, and the sign goes as soon as the site answers again.

The Internet Desktop

One of the desktops that comes with the program is Internet. (It was called Browsing for a while; a desktop you named that yourself still gets the same offer.) Its folder is Bookmarks, beside your Desktop folder, in your OneDrive if that's where you keep things.

Bringing Your Bookmarks In

When you create the Internet desktop from the + page, a window asks which browsers to gather bookmarks from: Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi and Opera, those it finds on this computer (a browser has to have been run and have bookmarks to count). Press OK and each bookmark becomes a .url shortcut in the Bookmarks folder, in folders that follow the ones you had sorted them into. A browser's own top levels (its bookmarks bar, menu and "other bookmarks") aren't folders here: what is on them goes straight onto the desktop, and only the folders you made become folders. An address that more than one browser keeps is copied once. Cancel creates no desktop at all. If none are found you are told so, and you get an empty desktop.

Bookmarks are taken as a one-time copy. Nothing stays in step with the browsers afterwards, so from then on the folder is yours. Move shortcuts between folders, rename or delete them, and view them as a tree in a launcher so a folder of bookmarks opens in place.

Web Pages That Are Documents

Not every web page is a site. A file ending in .html or .htm on your own disk opens as a document with Read, Edit and Source tabs, and you can change it a paragraph at a time. A document like that doesn't follow its links. That is the other half of the difference: a .url goes out to the web; an .html is something you have. The Text page is about those. The Wikipedia panel in the right-hand strip is a smaller kind of browser of its own: type a topic and press Enter.