Google Releases V.2 of Its Firefox Toolbar

Google has announced version 2 of its Firefox toolbar. It's in beta, of course. You can download it at http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/index.html.

New features include an enhanced search box (search and spelling suggestions as well as searching from your own history), once-click RSS feed subscriptions, custom layouts, and "Google Safe Browsing," that is apparently a way to warn you when you may be visiting phishing sites, but there was nothing in the description that made me want to get away from Spoofstick.

When you install a Firefox extension you have to exit and restart the browser for it to work. When you do that in this case you'll get a warning box saying that in order to take advantage of seeing site PageRank and getting up to date information on Google Safe Browsing, you have to send some information about the sites you're visiting to Google. So you can choose here whether you want to enable or disable those features. Disable means you don't send information to Google, enable means you do. The top of this box also has checkboxes that ask if you want to use Google as your default search engine and if you want to allow downloads from Google. Both those boxes are checked. I unchecked the allow downloads one.

Once installed, the Google Toolbar offers a search page, spell check, highlighting of searched-for terms, and more. The one-click subscription form for RSS feeds works with Google Home (natch), Firefox Live Bookmarks, NewsGator, Pluck, Bloglines, and My Yahoo. Using the Options button the right of the toolbar you have the ability to add more features including a word translator, the ability to send mail with GMail, several Google-specific search properties, and a "Blog This" Blogger button.

Unfortunately I did not see a way to disable the PageRank and Safe Browsing features once the toolbar was installed. Did I miss it, or is the decision you make when you install the toolbar the one you're stuck with? Of course you can always uninstall the toolbar and start over.

I like the Google Firefox toolbar okay. If I used more Google tools like Blogger, or a Web-based feedreader like Bloglines or Pluck, I might like it a lot more. As it is Firefox has a search box to start with, and I don't need the rest of the tools here.

Posted to Search Engines-Google