Toolbar 2.0

Very interesting GG. Thanks for the heads up.

I've not had the toolbar installed for quite some time now.

The blog feature looks interesting. Any interest in doing a 'webmasterworld' feature? (duck)

I'll give it a spin. Looks like hours of fun. ;)

What's this "Vote against this page" & "Vote for this page" buttons for?

The form filler might be a great Gator killer :)

Interesting GG.

Popup Blocker/AutoFill

Looks like we are finally seeing a move to commercialize the G toolbar. The above stated features are tools that get to the core of the surfing experience, not simply search. By combining both search driven faculty with surfing experience(with a pinch of publishing capability), G is providing a compelling reason for non-SEMs to download. Personally, I now use the G and Y toolbar. I can see this toolbar situation, starting an arms race of sorts, due to its default search condition on the browser, and the ability to bundle user experience tools. Interesting.

>auto form-filling

Can you tell us where/how this information is stored, GoogleGuy? Is it sent back to Google in any way, shape, or form?

Lets hope there will be a version for Opera... I only use IE to look up the pagerank...

Just installed version 2.0.86-deleon/en Beta.

Looks nice. The list of 'Google Links' has now been extended with 'Blogger.com' and 'Zeitgeist', but I miss the 'Glossary'.

So where's the Mozilla/Linux version?

With all this IE bashing going on, I thought this was the best opportunity for someone like Google to accept the switch and move onto Mozilla.
There is a mozilla Google toolbar, called Googlebar but it lacks the Pagerank feature. If only Google would give them a helping hand we could have a very happy linux/mozilla community.

Rob

ohohoh... "Fix PageRank through proxies"

Fix PageRank through proxies - If you are behind a firewall and a proxy server, PageRank may not perform reliably. Use this experimental option only if you are having problems with PageRank not displaying results.

[toolbar.google.com...]

Yep, I'll have to give this a whirl when I get on my Home PC tonight.

Interesting - Blogthis feature - Create a weblog post pointing to the page you are visiting - room for abuse here? (note I dont really get the idea of weblogs - bit dim when it comes to some things)

Three cheers for the popup blocker. Popups are usually harmful to the Web experience. I can't wait until unsolicited commercial popups, like spam email, go extinct completely.

But as the Toolbar documentation points out, popups *sometimes* show useful information. And sometimes you don't know whether a popup contains useful information until after you read its title. The Toolbar seems to offer no way to view the title of the popups that are in the penalty box, and I think it would be helpful if it did. To that end a dropdown box of active popups, similar to what some other popup blockers do, would be real cool.

Nice catch, perfecttommy. Why should where I'm accessing the Internet have any bearing whatsoever on a page's reported PageRank tier? (Psst...it shouldn't.)

Love the pop up feature, (I don't use Opera as much as I should.

Also the auto form feature it nice but sometimes I like to have things sent to different addresses.

The toolbar Options screen is very nice.

Thanks GG

Bravo

Good news, I tried to download it, but failed.
error message is as below:

The Google Toolbar installer was unable to authenticate the Google Toolbar. The code signature was not found.

But I would like to try it later!

While I'm complaining, I think having that Blogger button there by default is uncool. It undermines Google's image of neutrality and muddles the brand image with extra baggage. It goes a tiny step in the direction that I thought Google was trying to avoid -- the direction of portals, self-interested integration, Microsoftish bundling...

But then again, I'm kind of cranky today. Maybe it's no big deal...

For us non-US folk, it is great to be able to choose the default country domain for searching.

The whole toolbar is also a great "hands on" way to illustrate to small, technophobe clients the power/importance of Google.

Now I just have to wait for a French version so half my clients can understand what it does...

Travoli, the info for the auto-form-filler is stored on the client PC, not sent to Google.

perfecttommy, a few people have requested that, so we wanted to give that ability.

dougb, I like that suggestion. In the current beta, you can whitelist a site by clicking the pop-up button. That will allow pop-ups from that site. So any site that is useful to you, you can set it to allow pop-ups.

jrobbio, the Mozilla folks have done a great job on the Googlebar. I'm glad that they've done such a cool job. Mozilla already supports some of these features (e.g. pop-up killing), I think.

Brett, isn't WebmasterWorld already on everybody's list of bookmarks? :)

dougb, you may just be cranky today, but I'll ask about it. I'm not sure if there's a standard way of connecting to any blog (Movable Type, or whatever) software. Anyway, I'll ask. :)

I absolutely love, love, love the new Blog This button. Having just started a blog at blogger.com it's just absoluetly fantastic.

Tigrou, we've gotcha covered. Click on the Google Balls (heh heh). If you mouse over the icon, it says "Change Google Toolbar behavior and layout options." The top option is "Search using" and you can select any current Google country domain from the drop-down.

Enjoy! :)

Ok, cool stuff, now with the flock of new users going to use it (hopefully for starts the blog community), will that give enough extra data to be statistically relevant enough to soon show Alexa type visitor/popularity stats?

That would make it an even better killer-ap to me.

What sort of popups does this kill exactly?

I.E., onload, onunload, etc.?

I'd download it myself and find out, but I'm feeling a bit un-Googley [webmasterworld.com] today.

Great, esp pop up blocker :) and option to choose in which Google you search :)

How save is autofill information saved at my computer?

GG,

Looks nice.

One thing though:

It highlights text area in forms yellow. I thought someone messed with my CSS. OK...just went into Options and tweaked settings. No more yellow in autofill. :)

While you are here can please explain why a website Site Map that has NO links to it externally shows the same PR as the Index page?

I've flushed DNS, cleared my cache, and now installed another toolbar. The site map has been a PR5 since first news of the FI update hit.

I think Site maps _DO_ make good entrace pages if one does them properly, but the PR is either not real (presumed PR) or it's "real" PR but does not have the anchor text benefit of the index page.

Anyone else see Site Maps with an above average PR showing consistently since FI update?

Regards,

AW

Hope that Google can come up with something for Mac users.

re: jrobbio, the Mozilla folks have done a great job on the Googlebar. I'm glad that they've done such a cool job. Mozilla already supports some of these features (e.g. pop-up killing), I think.

Personally, it would have been real nice if the work had come from Google rather than mozdev having to work hard at it. Mozilla Firebird supports popup killing for sure. What every webmaster wants is the PR bar on a non-IE format. There may be a big shift away to other browsers if that happens, which is a good thing.

Rob

I just tried the pop-up blocker. I like it. And it proves my point that chronic procrastination is actually a good thing. :) I was too lazy to ever order and pay for a commercial pop-up blocker, so now I got one for free.

I was wondering about the pop-up blocker feature at first because I got a Google pop-up telling me that it had blocked a Netscape pop-up. (It only happened the first time, though and after that the next time it blocked the Netscape pop-up I just got a Google toolbar message at the bottom of my screen. )

It highlights text area in forms yellow. I thought someone messed with my CSS. OK...just went into Options and tweaked settings. No more yellow in autofill.

That is one feature I really don't like. I couldn't figure out why certain forms were yellow on my site, but not on others. Especially when you have a site that clashes horribly with that yellow highlight color. Many people who download this toolbar would think I was color blind to choose that extreme yellow with the particular color of my site.

I uninstalled the toolbar, no yellow. Reinstalled, yellow. Didn't realize it was highlighting it because it was an area the toolbar could autofil (even though I didn't have any autofill preferences set yet in the autofill tab, hmmm....)

Now I have tweaked that autofill setting, thank you Alphawolf!