Reader John used the Contact link to ask:
“Hi Fred! My problem isn’t with Registry per se, but rather MS’s confused muddling (mangling?) of OS vs apps & user data. Please tell me why MS chooses to store my Internet Explorer bookmark order (i.e., my arranged bookmark order – in other words, the order I prefer & choose to arrange & display my IE bookmarks… versus, say, alphabetical order) in their $%#%&#$ registry?”
I hear you, John! IE’s issues with the sorting of Favorites/Bookmarks isn’t something new — it’s been clumsy almost from the start.
But it’s never been fixed, and likely never will be. Here’s why:
First, and to answer your direct question, the data in the Registry is stored in a standardized, hierarchical fashion that’s optimized for software to read and parse, so your OS and apps can see what the other apps are doing and what data they’re using. Human convenience — such as storing the data in a user-selectable order — wasn’t a major consideration.
So, why not fix the problem with some kind of add-on sorting option for IE?
With a better foundation, that probably could have been done decades ago. But IE lacks a solid foundation! Recall that IE is now 23 years old (IE first appeared in 1995 as part of the “Internet Jumpstart Kit” in “Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95”).
Over the years, IE became encrusted with an incredible number of add-on/splice-on features and functions. This complexity made IE the slowest of the major browsers; and also gave rise to numerous security vulnerabilities, which lead to IE earning the reputation as the least-secure of the major browsers.
Worse, IE’s morass of weird, internal, interdependencies made constructive change nearly impossible: Fixing problem X might break feature Y; fixing feature Y would then break Z, A, and B… and so on.
Making changes or adding features became an exercise in software-development whack-a-mole, so Microsoft stopped development of IE back in 2013, with the release of the final version of the browser: IE11. No new usability features are coming to IE, ever. Rather, IE is on life support, with the browser receiving only essential security updates for the next few years, until even that limited support ceases. (See this IE support page.)
IE11 is somewhat streamlined compared to previous versions but — because it needed to retain compatibility with two decades of add-ons/add-ins and custom apps that users had come to rely on — it’s still Internet Explorer, with many of its warts, foibles, and crazy complexities intact.
So that, in a nutshell, is why IE still has so many quirks and oddities; and why its settings are stored in the Registry in a software-friendly (not human-friendly) manner.
There are various workaround to IE’s mangled-bookmarks issues (see this TechNet discussion, for example: Changing the order of/move Favorites in IE 11), but the workarounds are often as clumsy as the problem they’re trying to solve.
You know where this is going, don’t you? It’s time — actually way past time! — to get off IE and onto any of the many alternative browsers. There are very few mainline sites that specifically require IE anymore — most IE-specific sites are either very old in themselves, or are special-purpose, internal business sites/apps that are long overdue for updating.
For general browsing, I can’t think of a single good reason (besides inertia) to keep using IE.
If you’re frustrated with its features or performance, there are much better options — faster, safer, browsers that are not on life support — to choose from.
And sooner or later, IE will be gone, and you’ll have to change anyway!
So why not explore alternatives now? A better, faster, safer, less-frustrating browser experience awaits you!
Major players:
Edge https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge
Chrome https://www.google.com/chrome/
Firefox https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
Opera https://www.opera.com/
(PS: just for grins:
)
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