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Google Firefox Toolbar Out Of Beta
wellington map writes "Google has released Firefox search toolbar (Version 1.0.20050923) after two months in beta. One interesting addition is Google Suggest, which guesses what you're typing and offers useful suggestions in real time."
Claims it's not compatible and refuses to install. Don't they support other beta programs? :)
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why? doesnt firefox have a built in one...?
As most of you know, the more extensions you add to FIREFOX the slower it becomes.
With standard firefox taking ~1second to open a new window, after loading Google toolbar and couple other "extensions", opening new window in FIREFOX will take several seconds.
I'm not even talking about starting a new copy of firefox after the old ones crash, that takes anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds depending how much of it was moved out of disk cache.
Perhaps it's time FIREFOX/Mozilla developers stop adding useless features, and concentrate on making FIREFOX *fast*? I'm sorry, but opening a new window of ANY application on a Pentium-M 2.13Ghz with 1.5GB memory should NOT take more than 0.01second. IE6SP1 opens instantly, and so do new windows of the same browser. Food for thought.
I wish Microsoft and Google could merge, then Microgle would produce beta products that worked already, and alpha products that are not impressive enough to upgrade to!
..that google suggest is available as a seperate extension (and is quite useful)
I have seen that when most software companies are to release software for Linux, the impression they give is that Linux *is* RedHat, which is wrong. Take Google for example. I have just installed the toolbar on Kubuntu with Firefox 1.0.7 with absolutely no hitches, but Google advertises RedHat alone. The same goes for Yahoo with their online games. These games run fine on any Linux distro I have tried with java properly configured, but Yahoo says somewhere on their site that [name-of-game] is not compatible with Unix or Macintosh computers. Heck RedHat is primarily a server OS...sheesh!
I agree. Before we start another trendy "reinventing the browser" drive, whether Flock or something else, we should at least make one that's rock-solid and fast. Firefox is great in many ways, because it's more secure than IE, but it's slower and crashes more than IE. When I develop, I almost always use IE because I know there will be less downtime from crashes and cache-related bugs.
exponentiation ezine
Please note, that the toolbar is incompatible with Firefox 1.5 (Deer park).
This is the only official Google release. Its really not that big of a deal when there are several other 3rd party Firefox extentions that add the same functionality. The only thing it does different, is add the Google suggest which I have found annoying to begin with. However, it is still a big win for Google as they have a bunch of happy Firefox users. If those happy Firefox users also happen to be stockholders, well... you get the picture.
- Contextmenu with "search for selected text", backward links, similar pages, and translation
- google suggest in der searchbar
- setup for hightlight colors etc.
- etc.
Its really pretty usefull.Every time something pops up on my 'puter's screen the message is generally so off-base as to be laughable. ("We're sorry, your computer has commited an irrecoverable error," for example.)
Google's "Similar pages" link found next to each and every hit from their search engine produces a ton of unusuable schlock. Google is gonna have to be pretty smart if they can come up with anything that gives even remotely relevant advice from a toolbar.
I'll believe it when I see it.
but am I the only one that thinks toolbars are a waste of space?
I won't use it unless it blocks popups!
I've been using the toolbar, along with Google Suggest in Firefox for several months. It ain't new. Marginally useful, but it certainly isn't "new".
13 extensions installed, still takes less than a second on mine. This is on a 1.5 GHz with 256 MB ram. Perhaps there is something wrong with your computer? Spyware, perhaps, from Internet Explorer use?
In any case, Firefox isn't really about windows - rather, tabs, which open in the background. If you learn to use that, you will get much better performance. IE meanwhile is designed to open new windows, and is also preloaded as part of the operating system. Obviously it has an advantage here.
Nor is it the fault of the Mozilla devteam that people are making, and using slow extensions. The whole point of firefox is the customisability. What is useless to you certainly isn't useless to other people. To people like ME, speed is itself useless - page download times massively eclipse time taken by the browser itself. The firefox developers can't be all things to all people. If speed is a priority over customisability and compatibility, perhaps you are better off using a different browser (like Opera, or maybe Lynx) instead.
Also worth noting: Google suggest itself is itself still in beta, but apparently, that doesn't stop them from including it in a non-beta product...
--
Best firefox extensions
if you like the fact that IE is preloaded in memory, you should try mozilla seamonkey (the full suite) that offers this option too
The FAQ clearly states that submissions from bland usernames will be rejected outright. Try changing it to "HOTBabe18NotWearingPantiesRightNow" and your articles will be accepted immediately.
Also, try lowering your UID. 917138 is awfully high to be taken seriously by the editorial staff.
one of my extensions used to check for update every time a new window was installed, thinkg was the update web site has disappeared so it was waiting to time out. I managed to stop this behaviour using /etc/hosts. Perhaps your extensions are doing simlar things. Time to tcpdump!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Let's please not cry lack of privacy just because there are useful suggestions.
Okay?
Well, congratulations, you've caught a bunch of people that (somehow) have even less knowledge than you. Get back in your cave...
I don't know if you've tried the next-generation suite based off the old Mozilla browser, but SeaMonkey is amazingly fast on my computer. It loads in about a second, compared to about 3 seconds for Firefox. I am a former Internet Explorer user who finally gave in to Firefox when it hit 1.0. Unfortunately, with each release, it seems to get slower and take up more memory. I've switched to Seamonkey because it integrates an email client with the browser and uses the same amount of memory as Firefox alone (I had never used Thunderbird, I always stuck with Outlook Express). Extensions like Adblock and Multizilla make the Seamonkey transition worthwhile. It wouldn't hurt to try it out.
Have you installed any tab-related extension? There are quite a lot out of there, including Tabbrowser Extension, Tabbrowser Preference and TabMix (which are "packages", big extensions with lots of features) and many single feature ones.
Check your extension list for them.
Oh, and I'd advise you to install TabMix Plus (2.4.1 beta) to handle your tabbed browsing needs, it's stable and gives quite a lot of options (TBE is much more configurable, but even it's author considers it as an unstable crash prone piece of junk...)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
a is for amazon
b is for bbc
c is for currency converter
d is for dictionary
e is for ebay
f is for firefox
g is for gmail
h is for hotmail
i is for ikea
j is for jokes
k is for kelly blue book
l is for lyrics
m is for mapquest
n is for news
o is for orbitz
p is for paris hilton
q is for quotes
r is for ryanair
s is for spybot
t is for target
u is for ups
v is for valentines day
w is for weather
x is for xbox
y is for yahoo
z is for zip codes
1 is for 1
2 is for 24
3 is for 3m
4 is for 411
5 is for 50 cent
6 is for 60 minutes
7 is for 7th heaven
8 is for 89.com
9 is for 911
0 is for 02
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
Don't I just need to know the Linux kernel version that the binaries were built with, so I know if I have up-to-date libraries?
That is called the Linux Standard Base, to which about all commercial and several non commercial linux distributors adhere to. So, if it is LSB compatible (would be a handy note from google), it will run on Redhat, but also on Debian, SuSE, mandrake and many others.
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Just curious, has /. UID 1,000,000 been issued yet? Can we get it on eBay?
Software freedom...I love it!
I think the most useful feature of the google toolbar is the spell check. Many places, such as slashdot, don't have spell check and some places, such as Livejournal, have spell check but it really sucks.
I realize now that there are probably many other firefox extentions out there with spell check, but the first one I came across and used was in the google toolbar.
I currently use it with Gentoo and on some firefox releases I had some trouble with the toolbar crashing/hanging as well as the spell check correction box appearing half way down the page. I am anxious to try out this new release and see if a lot of these issue have been solved.
I hope they've fixed the bug that caused "A script on this page is causing mozilla to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?" to show up. Extensions that don't work correctly is one thing, but it's unacceptable when they affect other parts of the browser.
I have also found that in Yahoo! advanced search (http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8) you can now search for Creative Commons content!
Google remains my primary search engine but Yahoo! is an extremely close second with results every bit as relevant.
I thought "Google Beta" was the full name and "Beta" was the surname for Google.
now that they finished the FF toolbar they can get started on one for opera.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Right-click on any toolbar and go to customize. Now you can drag your favorite buttons from the Google toolbar onto your regular toolbar. Now, *turn off* the Google toolbar.
No, not at all.
/rant
I use a commercial app that retains the browser toolbar, add a couple of its own, then opens a PDF under that. The PDF toolbars are moveable, but who wants to do that every time? Customizations are not sticky and I am tired of clicking OK for "a newer version is available... blah blah blah.) The check box: "don't show this again" is not retained between browser sessions...
This results in a viewable window less than 50% of the screen dimension.
F11 (fullscreen) helps somewhat, but even the F11 shortcut is hit and miss.
M
http://www.inquisitorx.com/
Inquisitor puts Google Suggest into the search field in the Safari toolbar. You can also map different key commands (such as control-enter) to different search sites. I often will use Google Suggest's autocomplete to help me type something but search for the term in wikipedia.
Right now this software is free but this same author used a bait-and-switch model with his RSS reader software, NewsFire. NewsFire was free until version 1.0, which became nagware, after myself and many others got hooked on the software. I am not averse to paying for shareware but I feel like the expectations of the software should be properly set up front. I thought more highly of the software because it was free, which lowers the standard by which I would evaluate such software. Regardless, I still like NewsFire and have paid for my copy. This author has also been accused of selling GPL'd code as part of his Acquisition gnutella software. This guy makes some good stuff but I question his morals.
Isn't there anything more interesting going on?? When did simple toolbar software become big news? If we're going to be talking about toolbars, why not something on one of the other 1000 toolbars out there that do more interesting shit? I think Slashdot has a serious case of celebrity obsession (or greased palms). This reminds of the fucking 5th masturbation in an hour when only air comes out...
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Welcome to last week! It's not even the top item on Google's blog anymore: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Uh, toolbar customisation in Firefox is hardly something new...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
A better extension is Customize Google. This extension will add several functions to make Google even more powerful.
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The first is Tabbrowser Extensions. This one is a killer in terms of speed. Use TabMix Plus instead: TMP
I have the functionality of Opera in Firefox plus some more (for instance, my tabs are located on the bottom of the screen and to switch tabs I mouseover them) and minus the things I don't want. There's no noticable speed difference, I've compared them.
firefox preloader from sourceforge
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
With the "CustomizeGoogle" extension you also get search suggestions, plus you can throw away Google ads and stuff, and it's much lighter. Not sure what the Google toolbar exactly does, but I'm not comfortable with huge commercial companies like Google trying to sneak into the Open Source software like this, when you know their intentions are anything but close to the notion of freedom that OSS promotes...
> Uh, toolbar customisation in Firefox is hardly something new...
That wasn't his point; it's new in this version of the Google Toolbar.
Google has released Firefox search toolbar after two months in beta.
So from that I guess we can conclude that Gmail hasn't been released yet.
Am I the only one who is unable to see/use the credit card info portion of AutoFill? If so, what the hell am I doing wrong?
Oh joy, a story about a freaking toolbar. Yay. I thank you for keeping us informed of cutting edge technology like the google toolbar. It's an invaluabe resource for those of us too lazy to type in "google" or click on our booksmarks to bring up Google. The real bottom line is Google is a commercial entity. They're not here to help you. They're in business to make money. I'm not putting a commercial entities toolbar (or any toolbar) on my browser. If I want to use Google, and quite often I do, I'll go to their site directly and type in my queries. I don't care about their lame auto-fill in feature and other garbage that comes with their remarkable toolbar.
You know, I really HATE the Google toolbar for Firefox. Well, actually, it's not that I hate it at all, I really don't want to use it in the slightest, but that it exists shouldn't bother me. The fact that I have to see a DAMMED AD for it at the bottom of EVERY SINGLE PAGE OF SEARCH RESULTS, EVERY SINGLE TIME is what I HATE.
I figured maybe there's be a preferences option to turn that god dammed repetitive ad off, but no. I either have to forge my user-agent, or switch to Clusty.com
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Amusingly enough, this story is most likely simply an attempt by the submitter to significantly boost their Google pagerank by getting links to their website inserted into Slashdot. Both this story and the immediately preceding one were submitted by "wellington_map", with the submitter name linking to "http://wellington.iclod.com/". Just yesterday there was a submission by "christchurch_map", which linked to "http://christchurch.iclod.com/". Both websites appear to provide maps and business directories for their respective cities (Wellington, on New Zealand's North Island, and Christchurch on the South Island).
Is it just me, or does the Google Toolbar come back when you open a new Firefox window or instance? I'm using Mac OS X and a recent Firefox build from the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH, and I installed Google Toolbar using Nightly Tester Tools to override Firefox's compatibility check.
The shareholder is always right.
The biggest gripe I have is they (as a company) are coming out somehow as hypocrites: Every time I search something they add a big image banner at the bottom of the page telling me to download their toolbar. Why are they doing this? I have no use for their bar, I've already got Firefox.
This would be normal at any other place, there will always be someone from marketing trying to promote their stuff that doesn't care about adding more senseless noise, but Google was supposed to be different. What happened to them? They were the guys that told the world "Enough with the senseless crap! People are annoyed by unrelated banners (and blind to them)! Whenever we do ads, we will do text ads that people will find interesting because they will be related to their task!".
And I thought they were right. They provided an alternative to the search portals alternatives we had 10 years ago, and they did great. Everything had meaning, magically every detail worked just as I felt it should work. But now? Now their customers have to invest efforts in products like CustomizeGoogle or Greasemonkey to bring back Google to a comfortable point. I just hope they don't start a cease&desist rampage against them.
Fh
firefox security issues - 1,380,000
internet explorer security issues - 16,300,000
to bad it doesnt work with ff 1.5 beta 1
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Something Google is out of beta - and in related news, the temperature in Hell is down to 31 degrees F. :)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Autocomplete doesn't work for me anymore now that I've installed the update toolbar. This has happened on 3 different computers...has anyone else seen this?
... this was spoken from the mouth of someone who has never actually done commercial development.
It does not matter if the toolbar does actually work in all versions of Firefox. Unless the Google QA team has test machines that encompass every possible version of Firefox across every platform, then they cannot test said platforms and thus can not sign off on the product actually working.
Also, despite what you may or may not think, there *are* differences between Firefox on different platforms. Different vendors compile in their own patch sets, which may or may not break that particular extention that you want to use. I have even seen differences between the exact same official released versions of Firefox when comparing Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux builds. A certain page will render differently on one than the other two.
Unless they can actually test it on all the platforms, then they can't be 100% sure, so they are perfectly justified in not supporting that particular combination. Otherwise they wouldge tons of complaint emails and bug reports on something they never actually tested.
I've been using http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en/ for months...
One thing I liked about Firefox's built-in Google search was I could hit command-k (control-k on Windows) and the cursor would be placed in the search box. Is there a comparable shortcut for the Google toolbar?
Timely... just today when I noticed that a majority of my extensions that had "broken" since upgrading to firefox 1.4 had updated and were now functioning I decided to see what it would take to force google-toolbar.xpi to install. It turned out to be really simple and I'm sure any of you could figure it out for yourselves but for those who haven't yet, in the interest of not duplicating effort, I documented what I did on this page:
k .html
http://www.dfw.net/~scottvr/google_toolbar-xpihac
Interesting is that the quick googling I did to see if anyone had a quick how-to or patch didn't result in anything obviously useful but upon reading this thread, I see mentions of a slightly different way to go about the same thing. I performed surgery on the XPI itself, which I think is worth mentioning since there is always the possibility that someone wants to install the Google Toolbar Extension who didn't already have a previous install from a supported version of Firefox.
--VR
seems to work fine if you force it..
k .html
http://www.dfw.net/~scottvr/google_toolbar-xpihac