Google Toolbar is the first software released by Google. The first version of the add-on was released back in 2000, when Google's most important services were the search engine, Google Directory and AdWords. Here's Google's homepage from December 2000.

At that time, Google suggested to "get the Google Toolbar for your IE browser and take the power of Google with you anywhere on the web." Internet Explorer was the dominant browser and it didn't have a search box, so Google Toolbar was a great way to promote Google. It also made it easier to search the web.


Since then, Google Toolbar added many new features: pop-up blocker, online bookmarks, custom buttons, inline find-in-page, automatic translation, spell checking, suggestions on navigation errors and more. Some of these features were integrated in Internet Explorer. Google made a lot of business deals and many popular applications bundled Google Toolbar. Google also developed a version of the Toolbar for Firefox, but it was discontinued in 2011.

For many years, Google Toolbar was the most important Google software. Internet Explorer was the only popular browser that didn't use Google as the default search engine. "Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, now accounts for less than 60% of the market, down from 95% at its peak in 2003," mentioned a BBC News article from 2010.

Internet Explorer's market share has decreased as Firefox and Google Chrome became more popular. Even though Microsoft started to update the software more often and Internet Explorer became faster and added support for many HTML5 features, the 5-year stagnation between IE6 (2001) and IE7 (2006), the 2-year gap between IE7 and IE8, IE9's lack of support for Windows XP, as well as the increased popularity of web apps like Gmail or Google Docs - all of these made Internet Explorer a distant memory for many users.

Google Chrome is now the most popular browser, according to Google. This means that Internet Explorer is no longer the dominant browser from the early 2000s. Google now focuses on promoting Chrome, which is a lot more important for Google: Chrome users are more likely to use Google's services and Google can improve the overall browsing experience, instead of only adding a few features.

Just like Google discontinued Chrome Frame, you can expect to see a similar announcement for Google Toolbar. Google Bookmarks will also disappear if Google Toolbar is discontinued, since Toolbar is the only product that uses it.


The last major Google Toolbar release was in 2011, so the Toolbar is probably in maintenance mode. If you visit the Toolbar site in Chrome, you'll see this message: "You're using Chrome, that's great. All of the features of Google Toolbar are already built into your browser." That's not quite true, but Google probably thinks that the missing features aren't very important or can be replaced by Chrome extensions.

Toolbars are no longer fashionable, they take up a lot of space and slow down browsers. Today's browsers have minimalist interface and use most of the space to display web pages. More reasons to discontinue Google Toolbar.

If you install Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, you may notice that Google installs an additional software: Chrome Frame. It's a plug-in that renders some pages using Chrome even if you use Internet Explorer. Web developers can add a meta tag that enables Chrome rendering if Chrome Frame is installed and that's especially useful if a page uses technologies that aren't supported by Internet Explorer (for example, HTML5 video in IE6, canvas in IE7, SVG in IE8).

"Google Chrome Frame seamlessly enhances your browsing experience in Internet Explorer. It displays Google Chrome Frame enabled sites using Google Chrome's rendering technology, giving you access to the latest HTML5 features as well as Google Chrome's performance and security features without in any way interrupting your usual browser usage," explains Google.


There are many Google services that use Chrome Frame: Google Calendar, Google Drive/Docs, YouTube and more. Now that Google Apps dropped support for old IE versions (IE6 - 2010, IE7 - 2011, IE8 - November 2012), Chrome Frame is the only way to use Google Apps if you can't update to a new IE release or switch to a different browser.

To see if Chrome Frame is installed, you can go to a site like YouTube or Google Calendar, right-click and see if there's a menu item called "About Chrome Frame". Another option is to type gcf:about:version in the address bar and see if a similar page is displayed.


To uninstall Chrome Frame, "use the standard Add or Remove Programs tool in the Windows Control Panel (called Programs and Features in Windows Vista and Windows 7)". It's not clear if Chrome Frame is only installed for new Google Toolbar or if the future updates will also include Chrome Frame.

Now that Google Toolbar is no longer available for Firefox, you can only install it if you use Internet Explorer. If you visit Google Toolbar's site using Chrome, Google shows an interesting message: "You're using Chrome, that's great. All of the features of GoogleToolbar are already built into your browser. You can search from the address bar. Create bookmarks with one click."



If you use Firefox, Google Toolbar's homepage suggests you to download Chrome if you want "to get all of the features of Toolbar and more".


Obviously, that's an inaccurate message since there are many Google Toolbar features that aren't built into Chrome. Here are some of them:

1. searching the current site

2. highlighting the search terms on the page you're visiting

3. changing the Google search site (maybe you are in France and want to use Google.com instead of Google.fr)

4. preserving the query in the search box and switching to other Google services. For example, you can go from Google Search to Google Scholar without losing the query

5. showing the PageRank of the page

6. spell checking powered by an online service (not by a local dictionary)

7. the "share" button that supports services like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, etc.

8. integration with Google Bookmarks

9. custom buttons that combine search features with feeds and other useful information

Some features are available as Chrome extensions developed by Google:

10. the Google +1 button and Google+ notifications

11. Google Related

12. Quick Scroll.

While Google Toolbar will not be available for Chrome and some Google Toolbar features are either included in the browser or can be added from the Chrome Web Store, it's misleading to say that "All of the features of GoogleToolbar are already built into [Chrome]".

Google Toolbar 7.1 for Internet Explorer has a new feature that shows Web pages, news articles, places, images and videos related to the current page. The feature is called Google Related and it's a bar displayed at the bottom of the page.

"Google Related is a browsing assistant that offers interesting and useful content while you are browsing the web. For instance, if you're browsing a page about a restaurant in San Francisco, Google Related will assist you by displaying useful information about this restaurant such as the location of the restaurant on a map, user reviews, related restaurants in the area, and other webpages related to San Francisco restaurants - all in one place," explains Google.


If you go to the Wikipedia article about Adele, Google Related shows 5 YouTube videos, 5 articles from Google News and 5 pages from Google Search.


Google Related is another feature that requires sending the list of all the pages you visit to Google's servers. To find related pages, Google needs to know the URL of the page you're visiting. The so-called "enhanced features" (PageRank, SideWiki, Google Related) send Google a lot of useful data. One of the most interesting ways to use the data is a feature that shows if a site is slow. Like all the other Google Toolbar "enhanced features", Google Related can be disabled from the "Options" dialog by clicking the "Privacy" tab.


Apparently, Google Related only works if you've configured the toolbar's search site to be Google.com (United States of America - .com), so you may need to change this setting to enable Google Related.

Another Google product bites the dust. This time it's a popular add-on: Google Toolbar for Firefox. Many users were surprised to see that Google hasn't updated the toolbar for Firefox 5, even though it wasn't a difficult task. After enabling the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, most of the features worked well in Firefox 5.

It turns out that Google no longer wants to update Google Toolbar for Firefox, but it doesn't admit that the product has been discontinued.

"Google Toolbar for Firefox is compatible with Firefox version 4 or older. If you use Firefox version 5 or newer, you won't be able to use Google Toolbar."


Google suggests a long list of add-ons that could replace Google Toolbar's features, but the suggestions are too generic. For example, Google links to the search results for [bookmarks sync] or [language translate] in the Firefox add-ons gallery.

A Google blog post offers an explanation: "many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser" and thanks the loyal users. That's also true for the IE toolbar, but there are many useful features that aren't included in the browser: auto-translation (a built-in Chrome feature), Google Bookmarks integration, using Google Docs to open documents, smart spell-checking using an online service, highlighting search terms, suggestions for navigation errors (another built-in Chrome feature), custom buttons and gadgets.

You probably remember that Google Toolbar for Firefox was released in 2005, five years after the Internet Explorer version. At that time, Firefox users who wanted to install a Google Toolbar with PageRank support could try an unofficial extension called Googlebar. Maybe that extension will be resurrected, now that Google Toolbar for Firefox is no longer available. Releasing some of the source code under an open-source license would be helpful.

For now, Google Toolbar still works in the latest Firefox releases if you install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter first and restart the browser. Here's Google Toolbar in Firefox 7 Alpha 2 (Aurora):


Last year, Microsoft's Bing Bar dropped support for Firefox and became an Internet Explorer-only add-on, just like Google Toolbar. Bing Bar is powered by Silverlight, a software for running rich internet applications. A few months ago, Google tested a new Google Toolbar powered by Chrome, but only for Internet Explorer. It's likely that the new toolbar didn't work well in Firefox, so Google decided to only offer an Internet Explorer version.

{ Thanks, Colar. }

If you've installed Firefox 5 and noticed that Google Toolbar wasn't updated to support the new Firefox release, there's a simple way to enable the extension: install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. "After installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, your incompatible extensions will become enabled for you to test whether they still work with the version of Firefox or Thunderbird that you're using." This should only be a temporary solution until Google Toolbar and other extensions update their compatibility list.



Google Toolbar 7 works well in Firefox 5, especially considering that the new Firefox version didn't make too many important extension-related changes.

Firefox's faster release cycle, inspired by Google Chrome, has an important downside: extension developers need to update their extensions more frequently and update the list of Firefox versions that are supported. Mozilla alleviated this problem by automatically marking almost 4,000 extensions as compatible with Firefox 5, but Google Toolbar is not hosted by Mozilla and it's downloaded from Google's servers.

Google launched a new version of its toolbar for Internet Explorer, but it's only for IE8 and IE9. Google Toolbar 7 focuses on search: there's support for Google Instant, the search box is a lot bigger and all the other features are available in the "More" drop-down.


There's a funny help center article titled "Where did my buttons go?" which answers the most obvious question after installing Google Toolbar 7.

"You may have noticed that some or all of your Toolbar buttons have disappeared with the latest update of Toolbar. The newest version of Toolbar helps you focus on the features you use the most, by removing your less frequently used buttons from view. If you've recently used a specific Tool on your Toolbar, its button will be pinned to the Toolbar so that you have easy access to it. Otherwise, all buttons are removed by default. Don't fret -- you can easily add your favorite features back to the Toolbar. Click More next to the search box and select the tool that you want to add. It'll automatically appear back on the Toolbar."

So Google Toolbar features are less discoverable, users lost some of their preferences, but the toolbar is less cluttered.

Google Instant integration is not enabled by default, but you can open the options dialog and check "Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing".


For some reason, Google also installs Google Toolbar 7.1 for Firefox, which is an old version of toolbar and doesn't include the new features. The extension can be uninstalled from Control Panel, not from Firefox.

After Google released Chrome, Google Toolbar's development slowed down. That's because Google Toolbar is no longer the primary vehicle for adding browser features and Google mostly focused on improving Chrome.

Google Toolbar 8 is a completely new version of Google's add-on that was available as part of Google Labs. "Google Toolbar 8 is actually built and runs on top of the Google Chrome Frame platform. This means that Toolbar 8 will run more like a web app in that it can be customized and updated much more frequently and easily. It also means that Google Chrome Frame is installed at the time of Toolbar 8 installation," explains Google.


The new version of Google's toolbar only works in Internet Explorer right now and it doesn't include all the features that are currently available in the latest public version. Google included some new features: buttons for the most visited sites, Google Dictionary integration and Google Instant. "Google Toolbar displays up to seven of your most visited sites as buttons. Click on a button to go directly to its site. When you download the new Google Toolbar your toolbar will display buttons for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Youtube, Google News, Google Reader and Google Tasks by default."

Google has recently discontinued Quick Search Box for Windows, which was included in Google Toolbar. If you liked the application, there's a way to use it, even if it's no longer available in Google Toolbar.


1. If you already have Google Toolbar for IE, it's likely that the toolbar has been updated to the latest version and you need to uninstall it. Just click the arrow next to the Google Toolbar wrench and select "Uninstall".

2. Install an older version of Google Toolbar for IE (6.3).

3. Now you can install the latest version of Google Toolbar from toolbar.google.com or wait until the application updates itself. You can also install the most recent version from FileHippo.

Quick Search Box, a small Google application bundled with Google Toolbar, is no longer available for Windows. The software was both a program launcher and a Google search box instantly available even if your browser is closed.

"At Google, we like to launch early and often, and iterate on our products. We often experiment with new features in Toolbar and sometimes we have to decide how best to focus our efforts on features we expect will yield the most benefit to users in the long run. Along these lines, the Quick Search Box feature will no longer be available in Google Toolbar. At this time we have no plans to release it separately, but I'll keep the community informed if these plans change. Thanks to all the users who helped us test and improve the feature," says Brian Rose, from Google.


Quick Search Box is still available for Mac, iPhone and Android, but each flavor of the application has different features. I think it would be a good idea to add all the features from QSB for Mac to the Windows version and release it as a standalone application. It could be a lightweight alternative to Google Desktop, an extensible open source application that lets you search the files from your computer and your online data from services like Gmail or Google Docs.

{ Thanks, Marcus. }

Google Toolbar 6.4 for IE and Firefox adds a feature that lets you share web pages using social networking sites, mail services, bookmarking services and other sites. You can select your favorite services from the settings page or repeatedly click on one of the options to bring it to the top of the menu.


If you share links using Twitter, you'll notice a new URL shortening service: goo.gl. "Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are: stability, security and speed." The service is only used by Google Toolbar and FeedBurner, so there's no web interface or API for goo.gl.

Another new Google Toolbar feature implements W3C's geolocation API, which allows web pages to access detailed information about the locations of their visitors. "We use information transmitted by nearby WiFi access points to determine your approximate location. Accuracy and coverage will vary by location, and we're working to improve both over time," explains Google. This feature is already available in Firefox 3.5, so Google only added it to the IE version of Google Toolbar.


One of the few sites that use the geolocation API is Google Maps: "visit Google Maps and click the My Location button above the zoom slider. Click Share my location if you give your permission for Google Maps to use your location, and the map should center on your approximate location, if available."

{ via Google Blog }

Google received many complaints that Google Toolbar is not available for Chrome, so it created a page meant to convince users that "many Toolbar features are already built right into Google Chrome".

The page explains that Google Chrome already includes a search box, a pop-up blocker, a new tab page, a spell checker and it offers a list of bookmarklets that let you create bookmarks, translate web pages or view Sidewiki annotations. Some of the explanations are plain wrong:

"Like Toolbar's 'AutoFill' button, Google Chrome shows you text you've previously entered on websites, to save you time and typing."

Obviosly, Google Toolbar's autofill feature doesn't have anything in common in Google Chrome's autofill, other than the name. Like most browsers, Google Chrome auto-populates the text field with information you've entered when you visited the same pages before. Google Toolbar lets you save personal information (name, email, address, credit card information) and complete web forms with one click.

"Google Chrome's built-in spell-checker, similar to Toolbar's 'Spell check' button, automatically checks your spelling whenever you fill out a web form."

That's true, but Google Toolbar uses an online service for spell-checking and the results are much better. Try typing "Engsh" in Chrome and you'll see that the suggestions are "Eng sh" and "Eng-sh", which Google Toolbar's first suggestion is "English".

"The find bar feature in Google Chrome works like the Toolbar 'Word find' button. Matches to your search term are automatically highlighted on the page. Plus, you can use the yellow markers on the scrollbar to quickly see where all the matches are located on the page."

Google Chrome's find bar doesn't work like the Toolbar's highlighting feature: the keywords don't show up automatically when you perform a search and you can't find the occurrences of the individual keywords.

I think it's a bad idea to claim that Google Chrome has many features from Google Toolbar and to list some features that are available in many browsers, including Internet Explorer.

The reason why Google Toolbar is not available for Google Chrome is that Google's browser doesn't have an extension API, at least not in the stable builds. The extension API is still a work in progress.

"We're working with the Google Chrome team to develop a Toolbar extension, as well as bring some of our most popular features to Google Chrome," says Brian Rose, who works on the Google Toolbar team.

Google Toolbar has a feature that lets you see the PageRank for all the pages you visit. It's not enabled by default, but Google Toolbar asks you if you want to enable the feature when you install the plug-in.

To show you the PageRank for any web page you visit, Google Toolbar sends the URL of the page to Google's servers. In other words, you're sending your entire browsing history to Google. If you don't enable the Web History service, the data is not connected to a Google account, but it's still useful.

Google Public Policy Blog mentions two uses of this data. "By getting a better sense of the most visited sites on the web, we're able to focus Google's automated malware scanners on the most popular URLs that users are currently visiting. Another example of the usefulness of this data is around measuring page load times. (...) For example, when your browser sends out a request to fetch Google Maps, we start the timer. When the page is finished loading, we stop the timer and send the elapsed time back to Google along with the Google Maps URL request."

As you can see from the screenshot above, Google Toolbar sends all kind of information to Google servers, including a parameter called querytime, that could be related to measuring page load times.

Google not only knows which are the most visited pages, but it can also track their loading times in a variety of hardware configurations.

Last year, Google launched a feature called SearchWiki that allows users to customize search results. If you are logged in, you can remove search results, promote them at the top of the search results page and enter comments. While the feature is useful to personalize the results for frequent queries, the "wiki" component was only an afterthought.

Check the SearchWiki page for "google" and you'll realize that the 27511 notes recorded by Google aren't very useful. Comments aren't helpful, even though Google tries to rank them by usefulness.


A similar feature is now available in Google Toolbar. Google Sidewiki lets you enter comments about any web page and shows some of the best comments in a sidebar. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments.


Google notifies you if there are comments about the current page, so you need to send your browsing history to use the feature.


Sorting the comments by date wouldn't be a great idea, because spam and silly comments like "lol" or "cool site" would be prevalent. That's why, Google developed a ranking algorithm that takes into account many signals: user votes, author's authority, text analysis. Danny Sullivan says that "Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports".


Learning some information about a site, finding if a certain company is reputable or reading a comment that corrects some errors from an article - all are use cases for Sidewiki, but it remains to be seen if Google manages to rank comments properly.

As with Knol, Google encourages experts to post comments in Sidewiki: "What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web?" Unfortunately, experts don't have an incentive to post comments and isn't always easy to distinguish experts from opinionated users.

Larry Page once said that Google wasn't supposed to be a search engine. "We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."

Google Translate can be used to translate many web pages, but you can't use it for pages that require login and for Ajax-powered web applications. You won't be able to translate a Gmail message, a Google Docs document or a Facebook message without copying the text to Google Translate.

I've mentioned in March that Google Toolbar tests a translation feature that extracts the text from any web page and translates in real-time. The impressive feature is now available in Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer and it works extremely well.

By default, Google detects when a page is not in English (or another preferred language) and it offers the option to translate it. Language detection doesn't send text from the current web page to Google's servers, but you'll need to send the text when you translate the page.

"When you visit a webpage in a different language than your Toolbar, Toolbar will display the translation bar near the top of your browser window and ask you if you'd like to translate the page. Click Translate to translate the page, or click Translate on your Toolbar. Click Show original or the x icon to close the translation bar and view the original webpage. If you change your preferred translation language, Toolbar will remember your language preferences and use them when translating pages in the future," explains Google.

Here's a Gmail message written in French:


... and here's how Google Toolbar replaces the French message with the English translation:


If you open another Gmail message written in French, Google Toolbar will automatically translate the text.

"The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese," mentions Google's blog.

Another improvement is that Google Toolbar's word translator is now available in the 41 languages supported by Google Translate.

Google China has recently released an experimental version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer that includes a lot of interesting features, but it's only available in Chinese.

The most exciting new feature is an integration with Google Translate that allows the toolbar to translate web pages that use AJAX extensively and even web sites that require SSL.

The screenshot below shows how Google Toolbar managed to translate all the text from Gmail, a web application that uses JavaScript to display the text messages. I didn't change Gmail's language to Chinese and all the messages are in English.


And here's an English-to-French translation for Google Docs. As you can see, Google Toolbar translated the navigation bar, the sidebar, the list of documents and even the contextual menu. When you use the interface and select an option, Google Toolbar detects the changes and translates the new messages almost in real-time.


When you use this feature for Google Reader, the toolbar translates all the posts as they are loaded.


Another interesting feature from the new experimental version of Google Toolbar is a sidebar for Google Bookmarks that brings many of the features that are already available in GMarks, a popular Firefox extension.

If you speak Chinese and you use Internet Explorer, try Google Toolbar, Labs Edition while keeping in mind that it's not a finished release. It's an interesting experience to use a software in a language you don't know, so you could try the toolbar even if you don't understand Chinese. For now, the toolbar is only available in Chinese, but the translation feature works for all the 41 languages supported by Google Translate (the main challenge is to find a specific language name). This is certainly the most advanced use of the Google Translate API and it shows that automatic translation is a feature which becomes even more powerful when it's integrated in the browser.

Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer, released in beta today, doesn't have too many new features: the integration with Google Notebook has been removed, the "new tab" page from Google Chrome is displayed when you open a new tab and there's a completely unrelated application bundled with the toolbar. Quick Search Box is already available for iPhone and Mac and now it's part of Google Toolbar 6.


The new application can be launched by clicking on the Google logo on the taskbar or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Space. It combines a program launcher with a search box and it shows suggestions, web addresses and results for simple calculations.

"Sometimes, multi-tasking on the computer can be a maddening process if you have to constantly switch between different programs and files. Try using the Quick Search Box: it lets you easily search both your computer and the Web from a slick-looking search box that comes up only when you need it," explains Google.

Quick Search Box is similar to the homonymous feature from Google Desktop, which only shows results from your computer. It borrows the mix of search suggestions and navigation predictions from Chrome's Omnibox, while opening web pages in your default browser.

Google should have released Quick Search Box as a separate application or in a future version of Google Desktop. As it looks now, Quick Search Box doesn't offer enough functionality to replace Windows Vista's search box or application launchers like Launchy, the new feature will certainly confuse Google Desktop users and it's not very clear what's the connection with Google Toolbar.

Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer implemented Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP (SDCH), a technique that speeds up loading web pages. According to Google's proposal (PDF), SDCH is "an HTTP/1.1-compatible extension that supports inter-response data compression by means of a reference dictionary shared between user agent and server".

The proposal explains that "retrieving a set of HTML pages with the same header, footer, inlined JavaScript and CSS requires the retransmission of the same data multiple times. [SDCH is] a compression technique that leverages this crosspayload redundancy."

One of the sites that benefit from this extension is google.com and Google decided to add support for SDCH in Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.



A Google help page provides a way to remove the feature by disabling the "Google Dictionary Compression sdch" add-on, corresponding to the file fastsearch.dll from Google Toolbar's main directory. There's even an example when the dictionary compression doesn't work well.

The developer versions of Google Chrome implement SDCH as well. Here's an example of dictionary for google.com.

The latest update of Google Toolbar 5 for Firefox added the "new tab" page from Chrome. When you open a new tab, the page shows 9 thumbnails of the most frequently visited pages, recent bookmarks and pages from recently closed tabs.

Unlike the similar feature from Google Chrome, you can disable the page and you can remove the thumbnails you don't like.


The goal of "new tab" page is to present a list of pages you are likely to visit, but I'm not sure that it's actually useful. Opera's speed dial lets you pick the pages and this could be a better approach.

"The new tab page is the default starting point for all tabs - it is designed to get the user where they want to go, and is not meant to be an information resource like the user's home page; that is, the new tab page is not intended to be a destination, but rather a jumping-off point to other destinations - we strongly want to avoid cognitive load and distractions for the user, especially those creating new tabs for other purposes," explains Google.

If you like the feature from Chrome, but your main browser is Firefox, "new tab" page is now included in Google Toolbar. You can also try an extension that brings Opera's speed dial to Firefox.

{ Thanks, Hebbet. }

Launched in December 2000, Google Toolbar started as a way to add features that were missing from Internet Explorer. Users had to visit Google's homepage to perform a search and the toolbar improved the experience by adding a search box to the browser. In the next versions, the toolbar added query suggestions, a pop-up blocker, a spell checker and other features that later became part of most modern browsers.

In May 2007, Google launched a plug-in that made browsers more powerful by integrating advanced features like offline storage, local database, location services. Google Gears added invisible features that allowed web applications to become more responsive and to work even offline.

The trouble with Google Toolbar and Gears was that users had to install them separately, the browser integration wasn't very smooth and there were many other things that could improve web browsing, but can't be added using a plug-in. A better JavaScript engine, a more reliable browser that crashed less, a fast and simple interface - it's hard to make all these things happen without building a new browser. If Google Toolbar made it easier to search using Google, Chrome encourages to use the web more because the browser loads instantly, you can find web pages faster and you spend less time waiting for pages to load.

A press release from 2000 explained that "Google exists to provide the world's best Internet search experience. Google accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy way to find the most relevant information available." Google changed the scope of the mission from improving the way you search the web to improving the way you experience the web. A better browser, along with a faster Internet connection, great web applications and an open environment that encourages innovation bring more Internet users and, as a consequence, more Google users.