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Microsoft Releases Toolbar Suite
Philipp Lenssen writes "Microsoft today released the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta. This brings true desktop search to Windows (for those who don't have Google Desktop Search or similar software running already) and also includes features like search term highlighting in web pages, auto-completing of forms, and a pop-up blocker."
There is a toolbar for firefox: check here: http://www.firefoxtoolbar.com/
Here's another link: http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
May conflict with other pop-up blockers and cause you to not be able to click on anything at all.
The toolbar has to be on-screen for pop-up blocking to work.
Needs administrator privileges to install.
Includes a plugin to search PDF files.
Includes desktop search.
Currently supports U.S. English only. Don't try to install it on a non-U.S. English version of Windows.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
For the last time, Microsoft promised features found in Google Desktop and Spotlight, years ago as part of Longhorn. There are *plenty* of cases where MS steals ideas, but in this case Google and Apple got to the market first with a product MS promised about prior.
Yeah, I'm aware MS didn't invent the idea, but they certainly didn't steal it from Google or Apple.
Thats funny... isn't MSN Search a... beta? So "final version" = "beta"? Explains a lot!
I just downloaded and installed this thing. 4.some megs for what appears to be an IE plugin. There doesn't seem to be the option to make the 'search' bar integrate with the taskbar at all (which was what my initial pre-install impression was).
I will say that I'd half expected for there to be a minimalist appearance. Nay, there's about 10 different buttons on the bar that gets installed in IE, and I was initially pestered with 2 desktop bar-specific nags. Additionally, the damn thing defaults to searching the web, not the desktop.
So I've been sitting here for about 10 minutes waiting for the thing to build an index. The Google Destop Search tool has about 40Mb of files on this machine, and I honestly don't think I've got much more than (if even) 1Gb of files on it. I've run a search for a couple files within the "My Documents" directory, and nothing turned up. There's no indication that the index is being built, or when it might be done, etc.
There also doesn't appear to be must customization ability for the actual search tool, either. Just build, or rebuild the index. No "exclude directory" type stuff.
The additional pop-ups look useful, though, for an IE user. It's all standard fare for a Firefox user, of course. Considering that most people that would likely use such a tool from MS are likely already using Firefox, I'd say chacnes are slim this sees much fanfare.
Can't say I'm impressed. It's got the same intrusive feel of Clippy, with the nice interface of MSN Search. Not impressed in the least.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Unlikely, as even Microsoft wouldn't consider this a critical update, which is the only thing that AutoUpdate downloads. If they tried that, they'd have thousands of large corporate customers ticked off that this had been dropped onto their systems without their consent.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
No, most corporations use an internal SUS server to distribute Windows Updates. Using SUS, the administrator must first approve the critical updates before they get pushed to the clients. That is, unless some assclown configured the SUS server and makes it auto-approve anything...
You misunderstand. It became market leader due in part to being a purely reactive organization.
One might argue that Microsoft cannot innovate to save itself, or you could say that Microsoft fills a huge gap by taking best-of-breed IT concepts and working them into a viable solution for customers.
Depends on who the spin doctors are.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Didn't do that for me, Google toolbar (and Google Desktop) is still there and working fine.
File extensions have been used on the Mac since the first Macs were rolled out. It is just that they haven't been mandatory, and furthermore not limited to three characters. Currently, a file's content can be determined by a) extension, b) magic number, and c) resource fork information. Needless to say, there's no evil_knivel.exe.doc problems on the Mac. Furthermore, file extensions is not a Microsoft invention (Microsoft doesn't invent). IIRC CP/M and predecessors used file extensions, and Billy Boy just copied this method of recognizing file content.
I didn't know this. What's the point? ZIP has limited use on a Mac, since it needs special attention to preserve forks. It is used primarily for raw data, and has so many alternate compression schemes (b2zip, gzip and so on). The Finder is not supposed to do everything.
It is an old feature on the Mac, as is speech recognition, text-to-speech and other technologies.
Right, just that it didn't make sense before Mac OS X, since Mac OS 9 wasn't a multi-user OS.
I don't know who was 'first', but Microsoft was founded in 1975. Gary Kildall's CP/M dates back to 1973 or 1974. Digital Research Inc., the company that was founded to sell CP/M was also founded in 1975.
AOL - one of the original online services
CompuServe predates AOL by quite a bit. CompuServe was founded in 1969. The company ("The Source") that would eventually become AOL was founded in 1978.
Intel - first microprocessor company
Sony - first widespread transistor radio company
Texas Instuments was probably the first to develop both these technologies. The microprocessor situation is fuzzy at best. TI's transistor radio predates Sony's by about three years (and Robert Denk's radio may have predated that by another 6 years). Sony's wasn't even first-to-market. That honor belonged to I.D.E.A's Regency TR-1.
Frankly, I don't think there's any 'first mover advantage' in these examples at all. On the other hand, there's a very real ability for the dominant companies to use their marketing muscle to 'rewrite' history in their favor. Few people question the 'fact' that Microsoft was the first software company, or that Intel invented the microprocessor, or that AOL was the first online service.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Sorry, I had an appointment. But I knew most of those, certainly Microsoft (ever heard of CP/M from Digital Research?) and Intel, were in no way the first movers, so that's what jerked my knee.
The original poster is vindicated.
Your own post shows that none of the companies, except perhaps Xerox, was the "first mover". So who is vindicated? Changing the qualification to "first popularizer" is a different question altogether.