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Google to Release Firefox Toolbar

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-toolbar dept.

daria42 writes "Google is about to release a Firefox version of its toolbar, according to an e-mail sent to developers of the open source GoogleBar project. The e-mail claims to have been sent by Google engineer Fritz Schneider and is dated 1 July. "It has pretty much the same features as the latest IE toolbar except of course for things like the popup blocker," the e-mail said (Pop-up blocking is an in-built feature of Firefox)."

10 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Yahoo's firefox toolbar by DarkHelmet433 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In case anybody's interested, yahoo's firefox toolbar has been around for a while. It worked out of the box for me on Linux and FreeBSD machines, including a 64-bit build of firefox for FreeBSD/amd64.
    http://toolbar.yahoo.com/firefox?fr=firefoxtoolbar

  2. Re:Wait just a dog gone second by truckaxle · · Score: 5, Informative

    google toolbar has other features like Google Maps, Google Mail checker, Google Video, Google Desktop searching, Google Suggest, and website thumbnails(preview images) on the Google search results.

  3. Re:Huh? by malarkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    The highlighting of the search terms in pages linked to by the results is not part of the "in-built" google search in Opera.

  4. Re:Huh? by bhtooefr · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's also some page info stuff (possible to emulate with Bookmarklets, but not easy), the PageRank (only the One True Googlebar can do that), and text highlighting (a royal pain with bookmarklets, but the open source toolbar could do that. Besides, Firefox and Opera have inline search, making it unnecessary).

  5. Re:Huh? by The_Wilschon · · Score: 5, Informative

    There exists a google pagerank extension for firefox.

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    SIGSEGV caught, terminating

    wait... not that kind of sig.
  6. It's not Firefox launching the popups. by spiritraveller · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is plugins like Flash and Java that launch the popups now. If you disable Java and Flash, you will find that you no longer get popups.

    You can use the Flashblock extension to run only the flash animations that you want to run.

  7. Re:Huh? by radish · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have googlebar installed on firefox - the number one reason is the way it creates a button for each search term to let you jump straight to that word on the page. No other search tool I'm aware of does that as nicely (though I'm happy to be proven wrong).

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    ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"

  8. Re:That's great.... by Chowderbags · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a highlighter built into the find. Press control+f, type your word, and click the highlight.

  9. About time we got the REST of the functionality. by John+Pfeiffer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been waiting for this for a while. While I appreciate the utility of Firefox's built-in dedicated searchbar (I have wikipedia, dictionary.com, google, and imdb on mine), I miss the 'open cached version' right-click options you get with the IE google bar.

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    Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
  10. Re:That's great.... by WARM3CH · · Score: 5, Informative
    Honestly, what does the Google toolbar offer that Firefox doesn't already have, or that isn't already adequately covered by another extension?
    Highlighting the search terms (no, it is not the same as / or control+F), Showing the page ranks, One click translation of the page, Backward links, Showing the google cache for the page. The other feature I really missed in Firefox was google bar's excellent AutoFill feature to fill the forms with a relatively very high accuracy and the option to fill specific fields only by typing a password (like credit card info...)