IEM Policy, “Place Favorites and Links at the top of the list in the order specified below” does not work correctly

Hi everyone!

I came across this issue with a customer, very recently, so I’d like to take this opportunity to fill in the community regarding this undesired behavior when using the Internet Explorer Maintenance (IEM) policy outlined in the title of this blog.

There is an option within the IEM policies that allows Administrators to manage Favorites and Links.  The option is actually called, “Favorites and Links”, and is located here:

Double clicking on the “Favorites and Links” option, will load the following dialog:

As you can see, there are several management options to choose from, but the one we are interested in today is the first option, “Place favorites and links at the top of the list in the order specified below”.  Checking the option should allow the Administrator to do the follow:

Select this check box to specify that the Favorites and links you choose should
be moved to the top of the users' Favorites list, making them easier for users to
find. When you select this option, the Up and Down buttons become available.

In reading this information, an Administrator would assume two things with the check box enabled:

1. Added Favorites and Links would be added to the top of user’s existing Favorite list.
2. Added Favorites would be placed in the order specified within the IEM policy.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Neither option below works correctly.  In other words, the policy does not place added Favorites from the policy and place them at the top of the User’s Favorites list.  The policy does not maintain the specific order of the add favorites from the policy.  See below for a policy example:

Using this example, the Favorites within this policy should be at the top of the user’s Favorites list, and they should be in the specific order specified above.  Not let’s run the policy and see what we get:

As you can see, neither option within the IEM policy worked correctly.  The Favorites were not added to the top of the user’s Favorites list, and the added Favorites were add to the Favorites list in alphabetical order instead of the order specified by the Administrator.

NOTE:   Microsoft is aware of these behaviors.  Internal tracking bugs have been filed against this behavior, but you should not look for these issues to be resolved in an IE Hotfix.  Hopefully, this issue will be resolved in a future update of Internet Explorer.  These specific issues currently effect Internet Explorer 6.0 and later.

While we are on the topic of Internet Explorer Favorites, I wanted to go ahead and mention another difference in behavior between IE6 and IE7/IE8, that I noticed.  When manually adding Favorites to your Favorites list, you may notice that the sorting order is different depending on which version of IE you are running, for example:

IE6

So with IE6, even though I added Yahoo! first, and added Ask second, The Favorites list order shows an alphabetical order instead of the order the Favorites was added, manually.

IE7/IE8

Notice that in the case of IE7 and IE8, manually added Favorites are not automatically sorted in alphabetical order, as in IE6.

 

Well, that’s all for now!

Regards,

The IE Support Team

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  I've been using IE8 for some months now.  In the past week my favorites list somehow changed to alphabetic order from chronological order.  So my frequently used favorites are now scattered all over the list.  How can I get the old ordering back?  and Can we have a "smart favorites" list (my idea) where list order is determined by the frequency of usage?  That way frequently used favorites are easily available at the top of the list.
• Anonymous
  July 01, 2009
  Hello,Do you have any updated information on this issue, such as a KB Article?Regards,Brent Hunter
• Anonymous
  October 12, 2009
  This issue is very frustrating for me.  When I add a site to my favorites, it no longer appears at the bottom of my favorites list as I'd like, but somewhere (anywhere) in the list and I have to hunt like the devil for it.  Grrrr!
• Anonymous
  February 07, 2012
  970400 The "Place Favorites and Links at the top of the list in the order specified below" Group Policy option does not work correctly in Internet Explorersupport.microsoft.com/default.aspx