Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Personally, I've never been a fan of third-party toolbars. I enable the Web Developer Toolbar when I need it, and that's about it. Even though I have a reasonably large screen, I like to keep chrome to a minimum. But a lot of people like to have a million buttons on the screen just in case. I guess there's no harm in accommodating that.

i like google toolbar's Drag and drop open in google docs.

My mom still had a search toolbar on her browser the last time I was over. It was completely for familiarity's sake. There was probably also an installer that she used that installed the search toolbar as an 'add on' and she didn't realize that she was going to get the bonus software. Yeah for free tools that do things that cost browser space :)

I see it a bit differently and rather than a "toolbar" embedded and adding to the code for a browser I support or suggest that 3rd party software applications such as:

http://go.to/searchbar/

also have merits.

Basically this is an "unsupported system" and based on code developed years ago while this individual was in College.

However it did then and does now still have merits.

First it enables user to not only select the search engine - the basis for your commentary but also the Browser. This can be changed over time based on user preferences.

Yes a user can "select" to search in a browser with a search tool that might be available for that Browser (AltaVista is not available for Firefox) or open a browser and then enter the search text.

Tools such as this provide a means to enter a set of search terms and then when entered the "browser is opened" and the search performed on that specific search list entry.

Type in text into a program with much lower overhead (memory and CPU utilization) than t having deal with if I keep Firefox open and one click to open browser and perform search. Change that search list slightly and I open another browser window and a list of sites presented on the revised search. Quite helpful when comparing search lists or the impact of search terms.

A browser tool or add-on is limited to the browser in question and it can be done but will take longer and requires more "effort" for comparative searches to be launched and performed within that browser than with a tool such as this that is not beholding to any given browser.

Nothing is perfect but there are different ways to achieve a given objective.

So when you ask why there should be "other ways" - here is another reason.

My take.....

Mike

Regarding page rank and similar tools: Not only are the niche features, but they don't have to be tied to a search toolbar. Continuing with page rank as an example, Google could easily create an extension that added just a button with a meter on it, instead of a whole toolbar. Come to think of it, I seem to recall there's a third-party (or would that be fourth-party?) extension that does exactly that.

One of my must have search toolbar feature is the search term buttons. Right now I'm using the Googlebar Lite extension, but Google's toolbar does this as well. Say I search for "Asa is God", it adds three buttons to the toolbar, one for each search term. When I start clicking on pages, if I get a super long one with volumes of text, I can just click on the "Asa" button, and it will search the page for the word. I know I can Ctrl+F to search for stuff in page, but I really like the search button feature better. It's quicker.

The other big feature I use all the time is Google's "search this site" feature. I can type a search phrase into the search box, hit the search this site button, and it will do a full site search on the current site I'm browsing. Again, there are other ways to do this, but this is very handy. Other than those two features, I'd be happy with the built-in Firefox search box (which I normally turn off to make the address bar larger).

I'm proud to say that I was among pioneers to talk about bringing more functions to toolbar (see: http://features20.blogspot.com/2006/12/access-bar.html).
But after some more thoughts I gave second chance to leaving search bar alive: http://features20.blogspot.com/2007/07/natural-languange-navigation-finally.html . The reason for this is that you can't have efficient form entry without search bar.

For example, I usually take weekly TV program and query it against Yahoo movies to see what it recommends to watch next week. I set search bar to yahoo movies, and it works. It would be hard to make everything efficient in the same manner without search bar.

Still, after Alex Faaborg posted on his blog that he still can't think of idea how to unite these two toolbars, I gave it a bit of thinking, and I think I've got one elegant solution, though I didn't take time to make mockup and publish it...

Toolbars seem to creep on to systems much more often than anyone installs them with the intention of being a permanent advertisemnet for the company and a hope that some user will say "hey what's that?" click and start using their service. java, adobe reader, and shockwave all install toolbars by default.

yeah, in Fx, any little feature like page rank is better as an individual addon.

With the way screens are designed these days I don't know why there isn't more effort to use sidebars or vertical toolbars. Half the reason I won't use search toolbars is that they're literally a waste of space.

Search bars are just added screen realestate to me, if i can have everything on the same bar (address, search bar, back/forward etc, menus) it works out better, esp if you're working on lower resolutions.

The Google toolbar for Firefox is entirely customisable. So this is what I do:

1. Install Google toolbar
2. Right click on toolbar and select Customize
3. Drag icons I need from the toolbar onto the main toolbar (in my case I put the pagerank icon next to the throbber on the menubar in Linux or to the left of the bookmarks toolbar on Mac)
4. Hide the Google toolbar

I've never had any need for extra toolbars. Hell, I could almost live without the default searchbox shipped with firefox and use only smart keywords.
I hoping future FF versions will include some right-click-fast-search-feature like in SmartSearch extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/188

Jake Munson: Agreed! I strongly recommend SearchWP, which does exactly what you’re asking for. I would love for it to be incorporated into Firefox one day.

As for ‘search this site’, you can always use a bookmarklet. It would be nice if this were possible to do directly from the search bar, though.

I agree, browsers dont built toolbars of this sort as theyre non necessary items for the majority. Search bars are becoming increasingly pointless bloat and waste, complication of UI. I'd like to see Firefox with Google toolbar, stop being shipped as it's bundling un necessary ui bloat with a fine browser, giving a different user experience than intended.

I usually agree with Walt Mossberg but in this case I think the recommendation is more geared towards non-power users. I love the Bookmarking feature on Google Toolbar. It helps me keep my bookmarks synched with all my machines and browsers (IE and FF). Some of my corporate web sites still only work with IE.
PageRank is another nifty feature.

There are also toolbars that can be useful that are more than just search, or that add user interface tools for sites other than search sites. Examples include istockphoto, smugmug, etc.

And of course powerful add-ins like the web developer toolbar offer a lot more than any search toolbar, and is very useful.