After Amazon and Vivisimo, Yahoo! releases toolbar for Firefox
February 11th, 2005 Leave a comment Visited 47 times, 1 so far today
After Amazon and Vivisimo, Yahoo! releases toolbar for Firefox
In what can be considered as more corporate endorsement of the very popular Firefox, Yahoo! becomes the next big search engine to release its own toolbar for this open source browser. Amazon A9 and Vivisimo’s Clusty search engines already offers their own customized search toolbars for this rapidly becoming the default browser of choice.
On Thursday, a beta version of Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox was made available on their website. It comes with similar functionalities to what Yahoo! Toolbar offers with Internet Explorer. The aim of this product is to provide access to various services offered by Yahoo! from the toolbar itself for easy accessibility.
Of course, the biggest aim is to get the users to use Yahoo! Search Engine from the toolbar itself. This also let users search keywords on the current site he is visiting without manually specifying the parameters on the search engines. The dropdown menu in the search box gives access to previous searches making it easier for users to keep a track of his searches.
Yahoo! has also integrated Babel Fish, a translation tool provided by Overture Services Inc. in their toolbar, which lets user translate webpages and content to various languages. One advantage that Yahoo! has over Google’s toolbar for Internet Explorer is that it also integrates Yahoo! Mail while surprisingly Google has yet not considered shipping GMail support with their Google toolbar.
Google also lacks an official toolbar for Firefox though many unofficial services are providing customized toolbars providing all the functionalities of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It remains to be seen that whether Google would be releasing their own version now that Yahoo! has taken the initiative.
Yahoo! plans to add Anti-Spyware feature in the upcoming versions of their Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox as the current version lacks that when compared to the Internet Explorer version.
Get your own Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox!
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February 11th, 2005 at 04:00 pm
Google really doesn’t need to bother releasing a toolbar since:
a)There are already high quality 3rd party Google toolbars;
b)There is also a great Gmail plugin for firefox;
c)Google is the default searchbox in firefox already; and
d)Google is the dominant search engine by a long way, and the toolbars released by competitors such as Yahoo are basically an attempt at a userbase grab.
February 11th, 2005 at 04:23 pm
I found that with Firefox that using Yahoo Mail would not permit any textual modifications, as it does in IE. I refer to bolding, underlining, text colors, and so on.