There's also a useful component on the left-hand side of the screen that functions similar to the My Sidebar pane featured in Netscape 6.0. MSN Explorer's sidebar pane contains links to news and events as well as a "My Stuff" section that offers additional links to customized content like stock quotes, radio stations, and your online Web pages.
Default tabs in the My Stuff section include "My Stocks" for current stock quotes, "My Calendar" for appointments and reminders, "My Pictures" for viewing and sharing online photo albums, and "My Radio" for listening to radio stations from all over the world. You can also customize the My Stuff display by removing some or all of the default tabs, or by adding additional tags for "My Sports", "My Movies", "My Maps", "My Wishlist", "My Car", "My Files", "My Web Sites", and "My Settings".
The MSN Explorer sidebar pane also features a minimized control bar for the Windows Media Player (which can be expanded in a separate window) that offers playback options for multimedia content. Additional information displayed in the sidebar pane includes a "Search the Web" query box, current weather conditions, and -- just what you wanted to hear -- a space for advertisements from various MSN sites.
One annoying aspect to the MSN Explorer sidebar pane is that, unlike Netscape 6's My Sidebar, you cannot currently minimize the MSN Explorer sidebar pane, which means you'll be forced to sacrifice some screen real estate for Web pages when using MSN Explorer. Hopefully, this will be changed before the official release of MSN Explorer, but that depends largely on Microsoft's willingness to allow users to effectively turn off the in-house MSN advertisements.
