July 6th, 2005 | One Comment
Google Toolbar For Firefox Expected
It’s late and I’ve been to the pub, but there’s rumours growing that Google will be releasing a toolbar for Firefox, similar to the one that Internet Explorer users have had for quite a while.
I really have to wonder why any Firefox users would need this - the only reason I ever used the Google toolbar in IE was to check PageRank and to conduct Google searches - and these two features are already available to Firefox - PageRank as an extension and the Google search comes as standard (oh and let’s not get started as to whether PageRank has any real value these days).
I know there are other features to the toolbar, but I’ve never really explored them, as they don’t seem to work too well (auto fill, etc). It also acted as a pop-up blocker, but this is pretty much built into IE these days, and hasn’t been a problem on Firefox anyway.
I’m guessing that Google will use the Firefox toolbar to enable it to gather more information as the Firefox user base continues to grow. The information gathered from the toolbar is obviously very useful and Google won’t want top be missing out on this ever-growing segment of the browsing public.
To sum up, unless there’s some added functionality, I don’t see the point for the end-user. For Google it could mean 10%(ish) more browsing information.
Update
Having taken a look at the feature list, it appears I may have been a little harsh on the Google toolbar for Firefox (must remember not to blog after I’ve been out for a few beers). The AutoFill feature might be quite useful (although there are Firefox extensions which exist for this already), so to could the translator on the odd occasion, but probably the most useful feature is the new spellchecker, which will check your spelling in any web forms. Again, there are already extensions which do this (read my Spellbound How-To on adSearch), but this might be more useful to the average web user who doesn’t want to go through the whole process of installing Spellbound.
Overall verdict: some useful features for the average web browser, but most web professionals probably already have this functionality if they’re using Firefox.
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I’ve installed it and the PageRank feature is mildly interesting but, like you say, what’s the point in having a second Google search box?