Customizing the buttons located in the top left corner of your Internet Explorer browser window is easy though it might not be obvious to everyone. Below are details on how to add or remove various Microsoft IE toolbar buttons such as the Home Button, the Page Drop Down, the Safety Drop Down, the Tools Drop Down, the Feeds Button, the Bonjour Button, the Print Button/Drop Down, the Read Mail Button, and the Help Button just to name a few. A lot of third party applications that you install will add buttons to the Internet Explorer Toolbar which will eventually clutter up the toolbar which also includes your IE tabs. Below are the simple steps to add, modify, or remove these toolbar buttons and drop downs.

Example Picture of Internet Explorer Buttons:
This is typically located near the top right of the browser underneath the search box in IE (located on the right side of the address bar by default) and then below the Google Toolbar if you have that installed.

1. Open Add or Remove Commands: Right click any where on the IE toolbar which is located beneath the IE Address Bar and Google/Yahoo toolbars if you have those installed. The IE toolbar is located to the right of your Internet Explorer tabs. As shown below when you right click on this toolbar a configuration window will open which you will want to scroll to the bottom of to Customize which will open another configuration window. In the secondary configuration window you will want to choose “Add or Remove Commands”.

    

2. Add or Remove Toolbar Buttons: The new configuration window that pops up will be called “Customize Toolbar” and is where you can add or remove buttons that will show in the IE toolbar to the right of your IE tabs as shown below. My opinion is the best policy is to keep these buttons to a minimum since less clutter means less items that have to always be loaded by the IE toolbar. Less clutter means higher performance.

   

3. Save/Test Toolbar Customizations: Now click the Close button to save your changes which will take effect immediately in the current browser window. If you have other browser windows open then the best policy is to close all of the other browser windows for the changes to take effect.

Thats it! You can change/modify these buttons at any time with minimal hassle. Good luck. So far IE8 is pretty slick to me. I hear you can load FireFox plugins into IE8 which if this is true I will be writing an article about soon!

For more Windows information including Internet Explorer tips and tricks check out the awesome O’Reilly book from Amazon below.

Windows Vista

William Stanek. O’Reilly Media 2007, Paperback, 922 pages, $14.28

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 9:39 AM and is filed under Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.