Always Show the Menu & Other Toolbars Bar in Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Since IE 9 beta was released to the public, there has been a lot of discussion about it feeling strange without the Menu and other Toolbars. You can bring them back easily enough, and here we’ll look at a couple ways of doing it.

 

Always Show the Menu Bar

You’ll notice now that when you hit Alt or Alt+T the menu bar will be displayed but won’t stay on. If you like to always have the Menu bar displayed, we can do it with a hack to the Registry.

Remember before making any changes to the Registry create a Restore Point and / or back it up.

Make sure you’re closed out of IE 9, then open the Start menu and type regedit and hit Enter.

When the Registry Editor opens navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft and create a new Key and name it Internet Explorer.

Under Internet Explorer create another new Key and name it Main.

When you’re done the path will look like this.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

Highlight Main and create a new DWORD Value.

Give it the Value name AlwaysShowMenus and give it a Value data of “1” then click OK.

Now you can close out of Registry Editor, and open IE 9. When you first open it you won’t see the Menu Bar, so hit Alt or Alt+T again and it will come up and will always be there from now on anytime you launch IE 9.

Or like in this example we just want the Menu Bar showing and not the other ones. Keep in mind that the Menu Bar will always be displayed now, if you want to reverse it, go back into your Registry settings you created and change the AlwaysShowMenus Value to “0”.

Always Display Command, Status, and Favorites

With the new version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft is going for more of a simplistic interface. This might be welcome to some, but if you’ve been a long time IE user, you might miss the various toolbars. To display the Command, Status, and Favorites bar, simply right-click an empty area next to a tab and check which one(s) you want displayed. Then you might want to lock the toolbars as well.

Now anytime when you open IE 9 the bars you selected will show up.

 

This should work with IE 9 Beta 32 or 64-bit versions. Hopefully this will be fixed in the final release of IE 9.

Thanks to Vishal for figuring this out. He also has the Registry Script you can download for enabling and disabling the Registry Setting.