We live in strange times, my friends. The world is said to end on December 21 (spoiler: it’s not), UK is playing UofL in the Final Four and, perhaps strangest of them all, Microsoft is turning Internet Explorer into a competent, user-friendly product that really takes advantage of their new Windows 8 OS.

Today on the IEBlog, Microsoft gives users a tour of the newly expanded launch options for IE10 on Windows 8. It turns out that the developer preview of Windows 8 last year didn’t let users customize their launch options for IE10. The consumer preview fixes this and then some.

First, if you’re confused by what launch options mean, it’s pretty simple. When you click on a link in an application, say a chat box, the program opens your Web browser of choice and it takes you to that Web page. Windows 8 adds another layer of complexity to this formula by having two operating environments – desktop and Metro. This leaves the question of which environment IE10 would open links in under Windows 8.

By default, IE10 is going to open that link in whatever environment you’re currently operating in. To be more precise, open a link in Metro and IE10 for Metro will open. Open a link in the desktop environment and the more traditional desktop IE10 will take care of it. You can change it to always open in one or the other though.

Strangely enough, you can’t operate IE in Metro mode if it is not your default browser. I’m sure Microsoft will change this later on as more people use Windows 8 and find that to be annoying. Of course, with Mozilla already making a Metro style Firefox Web browser, we may not need to care. We can just toss IE into the annals of program files to never be used again.