I don’t necessarily want Internet Explorer Suggested Sites on my Favourites Bar in Internet Explorer. I just want My Favourites. Yes, I’m talking about the Suggested Sites shortcut which appears on the Favourites Bar and defies all attempts to remove it permanently. Deleting the shortcut from the Favourites Bar does not prevent it from returning.
However I have searched some forums and saw a new fix today from someone who at least understands the problem (many don’t).
Lorjack’s fix from the Tech Support Forum
This is where I found his solution:
After lorjack’s method you can see my take on the subject.
Here is the solution originally posted by lorjack (spelling corrected):
You can try this solution if it keeps coming back.
1. Click the Favourites button in the toolbar. This brings up a window with three tabs: Favourites, Feeds, History.
2. Select the Favourites tab. You should see, among other things, a folder called Favourites Bar.
3. Click on Favourites Bar folder and it should expand, showing the contents of the folder. These items should match what you see in your Favourites bar on the screen, including the unwanted Suggested Sites item.
4. Follow Catalynn’s directions: right-click on the Suggested Sites item (from #3), select Properties, which brings up a (hopefully familiar) standard File Properties window, with tabs General, Web Document, Security, Details. Choose General tab. Near the bottom of the General tab are check boxes for the Read-Only and Hidden attributes. Check them both. Click Apply then click OK.
5. Note that after step 4, the Suggested Sites button is still present on the screen until you force IE to redraw/rebuild the tool bar. I did this by using Tools > Toolbars to uncheck Favorites Bar (making it disappear entirely) then check Favorites Bar again (making it reappear WITHOUT Suggested Sites).HTH,
StevePS. The bug here seems to be that unchecking Suggested Sites from Internet Options does _not_ get rid of the Suggested Sites shortcut (“web slice”) from the Favorites Bar.
The official way to deal with the Internet Explorer Suggested Sites shortcut
The official way to install or remove the Internet Explorer Suggested Sites shortcut is to go to the Command bar and select the Tools menu from where Suggested Sites can be turned on or off thus:
If you click on Suggested Sites to turn it on you will be presented with the following choice:
If you turn on Suggested Sites the shortcut should appear on the Favourites bar. Normally it appears on the left. If you sort the Favourites bar by name it will move and be placed after all your Favourites bar folders and appear in alpha-numeric order in the favourites that follow.
What Happens When Internet Explorer Suggested Sites Is Used?
1. If you click on the Suggested Sites shortcut you will mostly get a window like this:
These were the suggestions I got while looking at The Telegraph newspaper. As you can see they are similar news sites.
2. When I was looking at WordPress (the tool used to create this blog) there were no suggested sites of the same nature so I got these suggestions:
As you can see these are just some popular web sites.
3. When I looked at: https://www.google.co.uk/ , which you can see from the URL is a site with a secure connection, I got this message displayed instead of any sites:
If I clicked on the arrow in the bottom left corner of the Suggested Sites window I got a Microsoft web page displaying this information:
I will keep an eye on what happens with the Internet Explorer Suggested Sites shortcut and may report back here when I have news.
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