Internet Explorer 8 Favorites

Internet Explorer 8 is the current version of Microsoft’s popular web browser. For the majority of Microsoft Windows users, IE is the browser of choice for putting those favorite websites within the favorites link. Favorites allow for certain websites to be saved within a list, which can be retrieved at any time. Favorites can be any website, like banking sites, email, news sites, or video and media sites.

With so many websites, it’s common for users to lose their favorites in the midst of a large list. Organizing the favorites folder allows a user to put certain sites in certain folders in order to maintain and manage a variety of websites.

Favorites Folder

As a user of Internet Explore 8, you should be familiar with the favorites button that is located in the upper left of the browser, in between the menu bar and that of the tabs area. Websites can be added to the favorites folder by hitting the favorites button and choosing ‘add to favorites’. There is also a smaller ‘add to favorites’ button that sits to the right of the main favorites button; clicking this will also add a website to favorites.

Upon opening the main favorites area, you’ll see the list of websites that you have added while using IE8. If you’ve just started using the browser - and you have not imported favorites from any other browser - you may only see one folder labeled ‘favorites bar’. This is the bar directly to the right of the small add to favorites button. Here you can add frequently visited websites, like email. Again, if you haven’t added your own sites, Microsoft has a few you may like.

For example sakes, let make add a few websites in our favorites list. Let’s have one for email - we’ll use Yahoo! mail; one for our banking needs - how about Chase.com; let’s throw in YouTube and lastly, we’ll use both Facebook and Twitter in order to keep in touch with our friends. Now we have five websites that we can use to start organizing. This is of course a small and meager list compared to what you may have. Many people have several email services - both personal and professional - as well as several media sites, social networking, and others.

Managing Your Favorites

Though we only have a small list of sites, we will use these as stepping points in helping to manage all of your websites. First, open your favorites menu. The first option should be the ‘add to favorites’; next to this text should be a small downward arrow. Clicking this arrow will bring up a list of four options -

1. Add to Favorites - here you can add the current website to your favorites list
2. Add Current Tabs to Favorites - if you have several tabs open and you want to save them, you can select this option
3. Import/Export - This allows you to import favorites from other browsers, like Opera and Firefox, to IE or export IE favorites to another browser (this option is also automatic when a new browser is installed)
4. Organize Favorites - Here’s the important option for our needs. Select this option.

Organize Favorites allows you to view the current websites that you have added. Within this small pop up, you can make folders, move a site link somewhere else, rename a link, or delete it all together. Using our five example websites, let’s make a folder. At the bottom is a button named ‘New Folder’. Clicking this, you can add a new folder to your favorite list. We’ll call this Email and then hit the enter key. Select our website link of Yahoo! Mail and move it into the Email folder.

Now, if you click the Email folder, you’ll see Yahoo Mail. You can also take this link and move it to the favorites bar, making a quick way of accessing your email. Back in the Organize Favorites, you can make other folders for your other websites. Name folders in relevance to the websites you’ll add in. For Faceback and Twitter, call your folder Social, for example.