How Do I Keep the Status Bar from Disappearing in Internet Explorer 6?

by Leo A. Notenboom

In older versions of Internet Explorer 6 the status bar would disappear from view even though you explicitly turned it on.

Question: How do I keep the status bar from disappearing in Internet Explorer 6?

Definitely an annoyance, isn’t it? This turns out to be a bug in Internet Explorer 6. You can read the admission in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase ~~here~~.

Shouldn’t we no longer be using Internet Explorer? Absolutely. This article remains for historical purposes – it is the first article published on Ask Leo!.

There are workarounds. They’re not horrible, but they can be a little involved. This question came up on Experts Exchange, and a couple of approaches are detailed there. It really depends on how important the feature is to you and how comfortable you are following the workaround steps.

Personally, I live with it, since “View”, “Status Bar” is a two-click solution for those cases when I care.

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