Open Barebones IE with Shortcut

Question

Is there a method to launch an Internet Explorer window from a desktop Icon such that the Status Bar and tool bar are hidden?

When a user clicks on the icon only the windows form (Maximize, Minimize etc) icons should be present. The URL bar, Toolbar, Status bar should not be present.

Answer 1

You could create a shortcut to a webpage that uses javascript to open a new window without status or toolbars and then close the original window.

var newWindow = window.open("http://www.w3schools.com", "", "menubar=no,toolbar=no,status=no");
window.close();

Answer 2

You could write an intermediate page that configures IE that way using javascript and then redirects to the real target URL. I believe you use window.Externals to access the toolbars.

Answer 3

How about a VB script, shudder...

Dim objIE
Set objIE = WScript.CreateObject ("InternetExplorer.Application")
ObjIE.Toolbar = false
objIE.Navigate "about:blank"
objIE.Visible = true

Save that as ie.vbs

Answer 4

You can write a simple program to do it, which you could create a shortcut to.

The basic outline would be:

CComPtr<IWebBrowser2> webbrowser;
HRESULT hr = CoCreateInstance(CLSID_InternetExplorer, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_IWebBrowser2, (void **)&webbrowser);
if (SUCCEEDED(hr)) {
  webbrowser->put_AddressBar(VARIANT_FALSE);
  webbrowser->put_StatusBar(VARIANT_FALSE);
  webbrowser->put_ToolBar(VARIANT_FALSE);
  webbrowser->put_MenuBar(VARIANT_FALSE);
  webbrowser->put_Visible(VARIANT_TRUE);
}