Preserve the order of Internet Explorer Favorites when transferring to another PC

The Favorites menu in Internet Explorer lets you arrange the shortcuts by dragging each shortcut to your preferred location within the Favorites menu. If you use the Import/Export Wizard in Internet Explorer or manually copy the URL favorites to another system, the favorites order is not copied to the target system. This is because Internet Explorer stores the sort order in the registry, and the Import/Export Wizard does not reference the sort order registry key.

Preserve the order of IE Favorites when transferring

In order to have the custom favorites order applied to another computer, follow these steps:



  1. Launch Regedit.exe and navigate to the following branch:
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \Explorer\MenuOrder\Favorites
  2. From the File menu, choose Export
  3. Save the branch to a REG file (e.g., “favsort.reg”).
  4. Transfer this registry file to the target computer.
  5. On the target computer, delete the branch:
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft \Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder\Favorites
  6. Double-click the registry file (e.g., “favsort.reg”) on the target computer to apply the settings.
  7. Exit the Registry Editor.

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Ramesh Srinivasan is passionate about Microsoft technologies and he has been a consecutive ten-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in the Windows Shell/Desktop Experience category, from 2003 to 2012. He loves to troubleshoot and write about Windows. Ramesh founded Winhelponline.com in 2005.

4 thoughts on “Preserve the order of Internet Explorer Favorites when transferring to another PC”

  1. or on same pc, if you did a parallel install or have another partition, use mitec registry recovery, manually create the same keys in regedit, then manually copy/paste the binary data from each key’s ‘Order’ in the mitech registry recovery (path to other system’s registry something like C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator.CurrentUser/ntuser.dat) to regedit’s binary editor.
    done

    Reply
  2. Very useful, thanks for that. However, I have both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of IE on the receiving system and, unfortunately, it didn’t do it for the 64 bit version.

    Reply
  3. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppContainer\Storage\microsoft.microsoftedge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\MicrosoftEdge\FavOrder\Favorites

    is the registry key for Edge browser. I think you need to clone the list of links on both PCs at
    c:\users\%username%\Favorites (IE)
    or C:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\MicrosoftEdge\User\Default\Favorites (Edge)

    I’ve successfully changed the registry sub-keys for order from Edge to IE locations to keep both browser orders the same.

    But I cannot find the Favorites Bar order entries.

    Reply

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