msapplication-starturl ignored in modern Windows UI

Question

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 on the desktop (“classic”) respect the msapplication-starturl meta tag. Allowing me to specify what URL to use when a user pins my site to their task bar in Windows.

In modern Windows UI (“Metro”), however, the meta tag is ignored. Whatever is the current page URL is used instead of the starturl.

I’ve used the msapplication-startpage URL to track how many users access my site using pinning. (By appending a campaign token to the URL.) Does anyone have a clever work around for tracking incoming users from the modern Windows UI?

Answer 1

Use JS in one of these two ways to track users pinning your site to the Start Screen.

1. SiteMode
   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/gg491733(v=vs.85).aspx This function will return true if the user has navigated to your site from the Start Screen. You can increment your counter every time it returns true

if (window.external.msIsSiteMode()) {
    //Add 1 to your counter
}

1. mssitepinned
   This will work with pinning on Immersive IE11 (but not on Immersive IE10). You can use this event to track how many users are performing the pinning action to get yourself an absolute count of how many times your site has been pinned.

 document.addEventListener('mssitepinned', IncrementCounter, false);
 function IncrementCounter()
 {
     //Add 1 to your counter
 }