"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Isn't that what desktops and shortcuts are for?
|
| I said, in the bit that you've snipped, that I neither needed nor wanted
| to change the order in the left pane; I just wondered if you _could_. It
| was just an idle wonder.
|
I understood. But as long as you're going to
talk about it....


| I've
| never used the Folders Explorer Bar. I find it too tedious to
| deal with all those tiny nodes. On XP and Win7-32 I have
| a custom Explorer Bar with links to folders within folder
| windows. On my desktop I have shortcuts to all drives
| and several commonly used folders.
|
| I think we may also be talking about different things; I was talking
| about the left pane in a normal Explorer window. I'm not sure what the
| "Folders Explorer _Bar_" is, but I don't think it's what I was talking
| about.

The left pane is where an Explorer Bar *can* be. The
other option is just to have a folder window. If you have
and Explorer Bar you can choose. The default is Folders.
On my system, when I go to View - Explorer Bar I see
Search, Favorites, History, my own custom bar, and
Folders. What you see is actually a shell extension. A
separate window that gets loaded into folder windows.

That started with Win98 and Active Desktop. As far as
I know it still works in newer Windows versions. I've used
my own bar on Win7, but I haven't looked into whether
Win10 still allows shell extensions. It may be complicated
by the IE changes. Active Desktop began an integration
between IE and Explorer Microsoft came up with various
shell extension options. Explorer Bar, Property Pages,
handlers for drop, context menu, etc, Band objects
(Explorer toolbars) and so on.

Window objects show up in Explorer *and* IE. They also
get access to what's going on in each. Gradually, Microsoft
have backed away from the integration. But most of it was
still there, last I looked.