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

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

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.

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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 work-around steps.

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

Shouldn’t we no longer be using Internet Explorer 6?

Absolutely. This article remains for historical purposes – it is the first article that was published on Ask Leo!.

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About Leo

Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed. After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.

Comments

Leslie J. Parker

January 16, 2004 at 5:40 pm

I am haveing trouble with the bar at the bottom disappearing from sight, how do i keep this from happening, or how do i get it back.
Leo

January 16, 2004 at 5:45 pm

I’m confused as to which bar you mean. The status bar is what’s discussed in the expert’s exchange article referenced above (http://ask-leo.com/archives/r-30810a will take you there). That article has instructions for recovery.
Anonymous

October 10, 2004 at 4:37 pm

I’ve done the steps MS suggests on the knowledge base site and the status bar still is gone from IE. It’s there already in windows explorer as well.
Peter

May 30, 2008 at 3:31 pm

Leo – love your website! My problem is that my status bar won’t show destination URLs when i hover over them. I can see them in outlook express.

Thanks, Pete

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Shouldn’t we no longer be using Internet Explorer 6?

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