We have a mess with this at work. Our intranet has many sites that require IE, and a fair number that require Chrome. There are some that can use either. Unfortunately we get a lot of internal emails with links to web sites, and are forever going in and switching the bindings so that clicking on the site in an email opens it in a browser compatible with it. I wound up leaving Chrome bound, and using it to copy the URLs for IE-only sites so I can paste them into IE’s address bar. We also have Edge on our machines, but I don’t seem to be able to use it to open our intranet sites. It tries to find them, or things that look like them, on the internet outside of our intranet, where of course they don’t exist.
I’m so glad I switched to the Mac years ago at home. Safari works just fine.
Younger users may not realize this, but the original idea was that one browser program would open any web site. Now they should give them different “extensions” so your computer can figure out which browser each one needs to be opened with. What a mess.
No, you don’t get a side bar. But I don’t understand why you’d want a sidebar if you think the bookmarks bar takes up too much real estate. A sidebar eats up far more real estate. The bookmarks menu gives you access to your bookmarks, but stays out of the way when you’re not using it.
For the same number of bookmarks, the bookmarks bar looks like it would take up far more space; I only have a couple of things on mine but it appears that you might get 5 or 6 per line; I don’t know what happens when the line is full, does it start a new line or do you have to scroll to the right? Anyway, I tend to jump around a lot so I like to have my bookmarks ready to hand. Someone’s idea of putting them all in one or two folders does work, but it adds a step.
The other thing is, when I have the bookmark sidebar on the left, it pushes the contents over to the right, covering up what on my IE is either empty space (when I have adblock on) or full of ads (when I don’t). Very occasionally a website is too wide for that space, but not often. Plus I can adjust the width of the sidebar, and make my bookmark names shorter, to save space, if desired.
My guess they don’t work on IE because web developers detest it and will not develop with it specifically in mind unless business absolutely requires it.
If you want a slightly-more-technical answer as to why IE causes problems, it’s largely about new things that have come to web development.
In the past few years, there have been some major advancements in CSS (the code that controls how web pages look) and HTML (the code that controls the content of the page). These changes have made it MUCH easier to make attractive websites by simplifying the layout of different things and also make it much easier for sites to be “reactive” (scaling or adjusting automatically to fit different screen sizes). As an example, something as simple as creating a “two column” layout with a main column and a sidebar is a headache in IE that can result in tons of buggy behavior. It basically requires an expert-level understanding to make it work in a way that’s reliable and attractive enough for commercial use. In modern browsers, this can be done with four or five lines of simple, readable layout code.
Because IE is a dead product, it doesn’t have support for any of these new capabilities.
That means developers have, essentially, three options:
Disregard the new features and only use code that IE can handle
Use the new features but create a “fallback” page for IE that uses IE-friendly code
Disregard IE and create pages that only work correctly in “modern” browsers
#1 isn’t really an option anymore because you’re limiting your ability to make an attractive, efficient product to satisfy a shrinking consumer base. This is basically only down now on intranet / legacy pages that have very specific user needs.
The problem with #2 is that it takes a lot more time and resources. It was commonly done until the past couple years, but as IE’s marketshare has plummeted, fewer and fewer devs are bothering with it. There are/were tools to automate this (which is pretty much the only reason ANY modern sites still work in IE), but as IE slips further and further behind those tools are less and less able to cope with it.
#3 wasn’t viable, because IE was still a huge market. But it isn’t now. IE basically only exists in corporate environments with outdated IT (and will almost certainly be gone in that environment soon as Windows 7 support ends in 2020), and a small group of users who either don’t know how to change or have made a decision not to.
It’s increasingly safe to simply ignore IE as a target platform – you drastically simplify the development process and only cut off a very small group of users (who are, no offense intended, probably not the target market for a new dotcom service).