Windows 7: Changing the Icon for sites pinned to taskbar in IE9

In IE9 you can pin your favourite websites to the taskbar. If it is a large commercial site it may have its own Icon and that is displayed in the Taskbar. However you are meant to be able to change the icon, so for sites without an icon that just display the MS "e" symbol you can design a specific icon so you can identify the sites easily.

I thought that to do this you go to the properties window by right clicking on the icon then right clicking on the page name in the popup window. One of the tabs should then allow you to change the icon. I know I sucessfully did this in the beta, but I am not seeing the tab to do it in the full product.

I must be missing something, but cannot see what.

Hello Chris, and welcome to Seven Forums.

I find that creating a website URL shortcut using the steps in OPTION TWO of the tutorial below works best for this.

Internet Website Shortcut - Create

Hope this helps,
Shawn

You can change the icon of pinned websites, but it's a bit of a hassle and a bit technical. Apparently in the pre-release version of IE9 it was simple, but they removed that functionality for reasons I've not been able to discover.
The pinned shortcuts are located in:

C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

Find the shortcut you want to change the icon on, and change it's filename extension from ".website" to ".url" Note that the ".website" extension will not show up in Windows Explorer, so you'll have to use a CMD box or other method to change it.

When it's renamed, you can right-click the shortcut and change it's icon. When you're done, you'll need to change the filename extension back.
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Alternately, you can open the shortcut (without changing the extension) in Notepad or other text editor and change the IconFile and/or IconIndex lines manually.
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Whichever way you do it, the new icon will not appear on the Taskbar until the icons are refreshed, or the icon is unpinned & repinned. I find the easiest way is to right-click and UNPIN then right-click and PIN while in the Taskbar folder mentioned above.
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Hope this helps someone. Hope even more that M$ fixes this screw-up.

- Dayton - Fri. 07/15/2011 @ 16:06:34

I understand this perfectly but I'm a bit of a novice with the CMD line... What is the proper text to do this? I would be greatful if someone could post the text to temporarily change this to .url and then the text to change it back again to .Website

Thanks

In Command Prompt...

File and Folder - Rename from Command Prompt

1. Type: cd "<full file path>" ; then Press Enter (this changes the directory)

2.Type: Dir ; then Press Enter (this shows all the files in the directory)

3. Type: RENAME "<current file name and extension>" "<New File Name and extension>" ; then Press Enter

Hope that helps, it worked for me!

@solx21... DUDE! I was so close (forgot the "quotes") other than that I had it right

BTW to all... Despite all the fiddling around in the CMD line this works perfectly
Thanks!