Tags: Linux, Microsoft

Google Toolbar for Firefox, Bittorrent client for Opera

This week has been full of action for the web browser market. While, the oh-so-nasty Internet Explorer was reported to have yet another security flaw, both the popular alternatives Opera Browser and Mozilla Firefox received surprising new elements. Google has now launched their official Search Toolbar for the Firefox browser and Opera Browser ASA has added a Bittorrent client to their latest preview release of the excellent Opera Browser.

This is what Google Team has to say about their new toolbar for Firefox: “Not that long ago, the Google Firefox Toolbar team met for the first time - and now we’ve built the Google Toolbar for Firefox in 10 languages for three operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux). Self-congratulatory urges aside, we marvel at how well suited this platypus was to our task. For a small team that had never worked together or used XUL, to create a product quickly that works across languages and platforms from a single ~250K download - that’s good stuff, if you ask me.”

Opera has on their part given the logic behind adding the p2p protocol Bittorrent in their browser: “While BitTorrent has been on Opera’s radar screen for more than a year, the true value of the technology became evident when the company launched Opera 8 in April this year. The massive response, with more than 100 downloads per second, dealt a technical knockout to Opera’s servers. With BitTorrent, users would have had an alternative download mechanism.”

The Google Toolbar for Firefox brings all the popular functionalities of the IE version to Firefox. This includes the PageRank display, Autolink, Desktop Search and BlogThis! The installation is a snap and requires a restart of the browser. Opera on the other hand now gives the common man a BT client for small sized files. However, it lacks a lot of feature of a fully loaded BT application. However, that is apparently not even the aim of the development team, as they want the browser to remain as user friendly for the end user as possible.

Download: Google Toolbar for Firefox | Opera 8.02 technical preview 1