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

Google and Beta

[Kylere]

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!

Worth noting..

[footissimo]

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

I know I will probably get modded down

[iamnerd]

but am I the only one that thinks toolbars are a waste of space?

Silly Speed Fetishes

[FhnuZoag]

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.

Re:Silly Speed Fetishes

[PhoenxHwk]

I still have a gripe in this regard. Each tab should really open in its own thread, so that its loading and rendering does not stall the whole interface. Drives me nuts when I start opening a bunch of new tabs (a la while looking at the slashdot front page or other forums) and then I have to sit through a stall before opening a new one. That's one spot where I definitely prefer Opera.

Re:The browser should be functional

[masklinn]

Sorry? developping with MSIE?

MSIE's cache blows, MSIE's refresh blows, MSIE has no development tools (no JS console, no JS debugger even remotely close to Venkman, and the recent Web Dev Toolbar is sub-par compared to Chris Pederick's, including the godawful DOM Inspector), MSIE doesn't allow you to see the current (interpreted/DOM-modified) source of your web page, MSIE doesn't allow you to change your CSS on the fly.

Firefox does.

Dev'ing with MSIE is like ripping your arms off before starting to write a book, you can still do it but the extra pain and harshness ain't quite worth it.

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