I’ve switched to Microsoft Edge on the advice of my son, who said Internet Explorer is obsolete. Okay. But what happened to my Favorites Toolbar with all my bookmarks?
As you watch the evolution of Web browsers, it’s hard not to puzzle over how the engineers responsible for interface changes actually use their own browsers. There’s no better example than the favorites bar, a simple set of shortcuts for the sites you visit the most often. A sidebar for favorites feels very inefficient and wasteful of space by comparison, and a tool where you have to bring up Favorites so you can choose them? That’s even more work and defeats the purpose of “one click away”.
And yet, Microsoft Edge not only has a clumsy favorites bar, but in my experience, sometimes all the favorites vanished completely, leaving me with an empty bar encouraging me to ‘add your favorites here’. Still, as the new default Web browser for Windows 10, Edge is still an important player, so let’s dig into your question. Yeah, and I’m resisting a snappy answer about “switch to Google Chrome to solve the problem”. Just so you know. 🙂
I know, I know, we all have our preferences and it’s all good. So let’s proceed. To start, here’s a typical view in Microsoft Edge with its default configuration:
It is an attractive and speedy browser, but where’s that darn favorites bar? Heck, how do you even get to settings? Turns out that the “•••” button is where all the action is, so click on that on the top right. A menu appears:
I’ve highlighted the “•••” menu on the top in case you’re not sure what I’m talking about, and then at the bottom, you can see the option you want to choose: “Settings”. You can click on “Favorites” here, but it won’t actually enable the toolbar, so let’s defer on that!
Choose Settings and the menu is replaced by a narrow window of settings and options for Edge:
I’ll switch themes to “Dark” because I think it’s cooler and helps more clearly delineate Web page content from the browser edge both. Then, lower down, notice “Show the favorites bar”. Click to turn it on and, if you already have favorites from another browser, click on “Import from another browser” to quickly load up everything you want to show up.
You can see that the Dark theme definitely changes things up, but more importantly you can see this long row of favorite sites on my new Favorites bar. Darn helpful.
Right-click on any of the favorites and you can delete the entry, edit the label or address or even change the entire Favorites bar to “icon only”:
I’ll choose “Show icons only” and, well, it’s not actually so helpful:
That’s a lot of extraordinarily unhelpful stars, isn’t it? Turns out that the icon for a site is loaded the first time you visit the site, so it should be something that’s filled in as you go to your faves. In my experience you’ll probably need to quit and restart Edge a few times along the way to get everything to work properly.
I also prefer text labels to just site icons, so eventually here’s how my favorites bar ended up looking:
Pretty cool, actually, and definitely so, so helpful! Until I restarted Edge and it had all vanished, as I said. Not so helpful. Hopefully you won’t have the same issue and it’ll all work just great for you. Now, give it a try and let me know if it works flawlessly for you or not!
Pro Tip: While you’re here, why not check out our extensive Windows PC Help tutorial articles too? Thx.
I had the same issue with bookmarks disappearing but they came back automatically and I haven’t faced this problem again ever since. My daily driver is actually Chrome but it experiences some bugs with Facebook lately which is why I turn to Edge every now and then.