Firefox Toolbar: Beta no more!
- Posted July 27th, 2005 at 7:44 pm by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Toolbar
What a rush! It’s been a wild ride towards 1.0 for the Toolbar for Firefox team since February: enjoying the welcome avalanche of user feedback, fixing bugs, and debating amongst ourselves which cool features to implement first. Now that we’ve polished it to a high gloss, we just can’t keep it to ourselves any longer, so here it is: Yahoo! Toolbar 1.0 for Mozilla Firefox. As usual, thanks to the engineering wizardry in Mozilla Firefox, our one toolbar works on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux.
If you’ve been using Yahoo! Toolbar for a while, you’re already familiar with its benefits such as:
- Bookmarks that follow you to any computer
- New mail notification for Yahoo! Mail
- Customizable, one-click access to most of Yahoo!, or any web site you choose
- Easy access to Yahoo! Search with an integrated search history for quick re-use
- Addition of RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! page with one click
For 1.0, we’ve made it even more useful for Firefox users (after all, we use it too):
- A drag-n-drop resizable search box
- A right mouse click menu to open bookmarks and toolbar buttons in new windows or tabs
- A search history drop down that automatically expands to the length of the longest search query
- Yahoo! Anti-Spy button that you can hide
- Addition of RSS / Atom feeds to My Yahoo! via the Live Bookmarks icon
- Support for the latest Firefox developer releases and alpha/beta browsers
- And more’
Usage of Mozilla Firefox around the world continues to grow in leaps and bounds, with over 75 million downloads since its release last November. To grow with them, we’ve also added more languages to Yahoo! Toolbar: Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong), English (UK), French, and German. Moreover, support for Mozilla continues to grow throughout Yahoo!, such as the ability to customize your Avatars in Firefox, and search your Thunderbird email using Yahoo! Desktop Search. We’ve several more cool hacks coming down the pipe soon, so keep your eyes peeled.
Toolbar concepts are flying fast and furious here with never enough time to do them all, so we depend on your feedback to guide future development. Please let us know what you think about Yahoo! Toolbar and what you’d most like to see next.
Jon Granrose
Yahoo! Toolbar Product Manager and Firefox instigator
- 23 Comments
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Lovely!
I use this thing regularly and am getting quite addicted to it.
One feature I would love – Add an “IM this page” option under the MyWeb icon.
YES! I love the Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox. It better have MyWeb 2.0 Beta in it! I’m going to update mine right after this!!
Great stuff. Forgive my ignorance – but are toolbars in any way possible for Mozilla’s Camino? (caminobrowser.org)
Its a great browser. Mozilla power, mac style.
Congratulations to development team. I’m glad that there are people who enjoy the new toolbar. But for me, the deal breakers are not fixed: no Drag & Drop support for bookmarking and Unicode bookmarks show up as &#yyy. Firefox supports mixing bookmarks in many languages, so I take advantage of that. But the toolbar doesn’t.
Another cool feature would be local-remote bookmarks synchronization. That shouldn’t be an automatic process. Simplistically speaking, one would select a mode (local bookmarks override remote of vice verse), press a Synchronize button, and bookmarks would be synchronized. Of even better, synchronization of local bookmarks with a selected Yahoo bookmarks folder. In that case people can maintain separate set of bookmarks for work, home, etc.
As one can notice, I consider Bookmarks as the main feature of the toolbar. Everything else, besides Anti-Spy, is just a shortcut to some Yahoo page. I can create shortcuts to the limited number of things I use on the standard Firefox Bookmark Toolbar myself. Any new toolbar that uses screen real estate needs to have more genuine features.
BTW, middle-click is the default FF shortcut to open anything in a new tab.
Hi I’ve been a Yahoo user since 1998 and I became a FF during early 2004. It is good to see that Yahoo is starting to support mozilla FireFox with many of their services and it makes me even more happy to see that Yahoo Toolbar previously known as “Yahoo Companion” to be one of those services.
What somewhat beats me down is the fact that on Yahoo on ther first yahoo toolbar non-beta release of made some mistakes such as: disabling the use of middle click to open links/shortcuts in a new tab, the new email notification doesn’t work [is that what is new about it?]. I guess that it wll be till Yahoo Toolbar 1.0.1
I would like congratulate you guys for being so open minded with this browser. You’re definitly going the right way
Congratulations to development team. Your toolbar is among the best extension for FF. I was always longing for an extension like this. For bookmarks I used CHIPMARKS. But urs is better.
Keep it up ;)
It will be great if Yahoo can design a mail toolbar for FF
I have been addicted to the toolbar for some time and love the fact you guys worked so hard to make it available on Firefox. I thought the beta was great already :)
I also rely heavily on my Yahoo! mail, but I cannot say that the experience on Firefox is frustration-free. God knows how many times I have to reload a page for those Javascripts (Reply, Forward, address auto-fill, etc.) to work!!
Is Yahoo! working on finding a solution or does this fall into the Firefox camp?
Thanks a million!
Kaveh
I’d like to get RSS feedupdate notifications and links via my toolbar.
I uninstalled the toolbar a few weeks after installing it simply because it did not offer any value added features. Yahoo! messenger alerts me to yahoo!mail, plays yahoo music, between the quicklaunch toolbar built into windows the automatic installation of program yahoo! menu items (intellisync,yahoo mail, games, etc…) what is the benefit?
That it is simply customized for FF is hardly a big selling feature. Most of yahoo’s half-baked new features barely work on IE6.0 and rarely correctly on FF.
The only feature that I would want is to have automatic re-login for the all the times I stray for a few away from yahoo.
It seems to me that yahoo! has started to be infested with Microsoftitis by wanting the whole pie and those that want only one piece of yahoo at any given time are ostercized.
A9 toolbar has some really innovative features and hasn’t crashed FF in over 6 month! Clone that thing or is it too ‘google’ for that?
I am sick of yahoo and firefox
I CANNOT get it to search like it did in google it keeps coming up with a customise yahoo page and its crap
it also does not tell you how to uninstall
- take a look at add remove control panel and youll see what i mean – where and how do u uninstall from Firefox or yahoo messenger or all its other cluttering install relics in add remove programs
NOpe i dont think any program is good that doesnt give u the choice to uninstall yahoo search
I need to find out if the Yahoo IT team responsible for developing the toolbar can either provide custom development services for a simple toolbar or can recommend a company that can build a robust toolbar. Have a client looking to build one for 250,000 subscriber community.
I tried to install Yahoo messenger and got a whole mess of additional features. The worst was that my firefox browser was messed with so the location bar would no longer automatically find the closest matching site to the term i entered. So for example, “target” would take me to a “no rsults” page which was totally annoying vs. the target.com site which is what I wanted. So, I uninstslled every Yahoo program and it *still* did not go away. I couldn’t believe that Yahoo would stoop to such nefarious activity of changing hidden parameters that arent’t easily editable. So, after some very angry searching, I found information about the Firefox configuration files and was able to recover my previous searching setup. For all those who have run into the same situation, what you need to do is: 1. Type about:config in your location bar. This will display a list of configurations for your browser. The bolded ones have been changed from the default. 2. Right click on the ones that have the Yahoo url in it and set it to “reset”. This will get you back to Firefox default settings. 3. Close browser window and open new one. You should be all set.
I was a long-time fan and Yahoo user and now find myself sorely disappointed. While some aspects of the Yahoo toolbar looked interesting, there’s no way I’ll use it given the underhanded stuff that went along with it.
I love my Yahoo toolbar. thanks!
I had the same experience EXACTLY as former yahoo fan. Unfortunately, i don’t know what he meant by step 1:
1. Type about:config in your location bar. This will display a list of configurations for your browser. The bolded ones have been changed from the default.
what location bar? Please help me!!!! I want this off of my computer NOW! I have done the same thing he did by uninstalling everything with Yahoo’s name on it. As far as Im concerned, I will NEVER use Yahoo again.
Please tell me how to cancel yahoo mail beta asap
The location bar is at the top where u type ur url,I’ll have to agree that Yahoo takes over google as the search engine without warnings.Usually one can type in url without the .com,with Yahoo toolbar u go to a yahoo seach site.No thanks…….
if you haven’t figured it out yet, you can unistall the yahoo toolbar, (in firefox), by going “tools->extentions->uninstall yahoo toolbar”
you’re welcome
sorry to say dudes. google fan for ever… it just rocks.
I like Yahoo I want to cancel Beta I been having problems. I want to go back to yahoo 7.5. I have problem with IM.
Thanks
Is there anyone who replies on this blog?? Lately my firefox is not showing me the “Page not found” alert, instead of that there is automatic yahoo search. I DON’T WANT IT!! I hate automatic searches, if I want to search for something I open yahoo or google and I do it by myself. HOW TO DISABLE this feature?
Vlad – it sounds like you have installed a program (Toolbar, Messenger, etc.) that set your Firefox address bar search to Yahoo. To set your address bar search back to the Firefox default (Google), you can follow the instructions on this web page:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/toolbar/troubleshootff/toolbar-32.html
Somehow I installed your beta mail on my new computer and I don’t want it.
How do I delete it and get regular hotmail back?