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."

Comments

Worth noting..

[footissimo]

..that google suggest is available as a seperate extension (and is quite useful)

Not for Deer Park

[broothal]

Please note, that the toolbar is incompatible with Firefox 1.5 (Deer park).

Re:Wait..

[gid13]

Yes, but it has limited functionality by comparison.

The new Google toolbar is neat, but it can't compete with the open source Googlebar (which Google, to their credit, offers a link to on the Google toolbar download page). Many more features like the use of Google Maps, and so forth.

The difference is so great that my browsing is significantly less efficient when browsing at someone else's computer, even if they're using Firefox.

Re:The browser should be functional

[BladeMelbourne]

"When I develop, I almost always use IE because I know there will be less downtime from crashes and cache-related bugs."

I prefer to develop using the Mozilla Suite (aka Seamonkey) or FireFox. I very rarely have more than one browser window open - I just Ctrl Tab though the tabs. This is not slow at all.

I have the Tidy plugin at the bottom right of the browser informing me of W3C code validity. MSIE can't do this. In my experience, Mozilla crashes no more than MSIE (about once every 2 weeks for me).

If you want to force Mozilla based browsers to download files every time, type about:config into the address bar. Then find browser.cache.check_doc_frequency and set it to 1 (it defaults to 3)

As a developer, in my dev environments I ensure that every page is set to expire immediately in the request header. (I have never had cache-related bugs from either MSIE or Mozilla.)

I have never had downtime due to "crashes and cache-related bugs". Maybe I'm just lucky?

Google suggest isn't new

[NineNine]

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".

Re:Shame it doesn't work with 1.5..

[job0]

You can fix this but at your own risk, the extensions will load but they might not be compatible with the changes in that version of firefox. All extensions have a file called install.rdf. There is a section called maxVersion that Firefox checks to see if it should enable or disable the extension. If maxVersion is lower than the current version, then Firefox automatically disables the extension because it considers it to be incompatible.

To modify install.rdf do the following

1. Close Firefox
2. Open %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
3. Delete extensions.rdf
4. Go to the extensions folder.
5. Now you'll have to go to every folder there and edit its install.rdf file with a texteditor such as notepad.
6. You will see something like this:
CODE

<em:targetApplication>
    <Description>
      <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em :id>
      <em:minVersion>0.8</em:minVersion>
      <em:maxVersion>1.0+</em:maxVersion>
    </Description>
  </em:targetApplication>

Change maxVersion to 1.4, save the install.rdf.

Re:Shame it doesn't work with 1.5..

[jeffehobbs]

Install the Nightly Tester Tools extension and it will work just fine.

~jeff

Spell Check

[SumDog]

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.

Re:Wait..

[jpaz]

Here is your link to Googlebar.

Googlebar

Re:Shame it doesn't work with 1.5..

[veg_all]

3. Delete extensions.rdf

Ouch. Careful there. You should back up your profile before mucking around in that XML. Also, the entire proposed solution sounds a little drastic. If you can download the .xpi (I remember google having made this a little difficult) you only need edit that extension. Instructions here.