Set IE10 to open in Desktop mode

In Windows 8, when Internet Explorer is set as your default browser, its default option is to open as a full screen App. There are several ways you can get around this:

1. Navigate to C:Program Files (x86)Internet Explorer and open iexplore.exe, and pin it to your task bar. Internet Explorer will open as normal in desktop mode.
2. Under Internet Options – Programs you can specify how IE handles links; either it will open them in App mode, or on the desktop. If you set that to Always open on the desktop it will open links on desktop mode, provided you’re not in the App version.

But what if you want to tuck App mode away entirely? Here’s one way that I’ve discovered:

3. In order to set IE to not open in App mode, you need to specify another browser as your default browser – here’s how you do that.

First, when you hit start, you’ll notice that the icon for IE is the new Fluid style, and not a standard IE icon.

Alongside that we have Chrome, which still looks like a normal icon:

From your start page, start typing in default to search for the option to set Default Programs:

When you select Chrome (or whatever other browser you want to use), you’ll see it only has 1 default (if any):

Click the option to Set this program as default, and that will change to looking like this:

And now, the icons have switched around:

Chrome now has a full size somewhat fluid looking icon, and IE looks like a normal icon again. Also, when you search for Internet, you’ll see that the App version of IE has been turned off:

Enjoy!