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."
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 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!
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.
download the .xpi, edit the install.rdf in the archive, set max version to 1.5. YMMV.
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.
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.
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.