My next thought was that it maybe had something to do how the items were pinned on the taskbar. While a click on Firefox spawned a new item in the taskbar, a click on Chrome did not.
Firefox was linking directly to the Firefox executable on the hard drive and Chrome was doing the same. I took a closer look and found out that it was not the case. This was highly confusing, and I first thought it had something to do with pinned shortcuts who triggered this behavior. Others however spawned a new icon on the taskbar, as if they were acting completely independent from the pinned item. Some pinned items on the Windows taskbar would open right on their pinned icon, showing it as active from that moment on. Recently I noticed a strange behavior that I could not figure out at first. The method to fix the issue that pinned items are opened as a new icon when started applies to newer versions of Windows as well. Update: Microsoft kept the feature alive in newer versions of its operating system including Windows 8 and windows 10.
Pinned items are always shown in the taskbar, regardless whether they are open or not on the operating system. Windows 7 users can pin programs, files and folders to the taskbar for an easier way to interact with the items.
