All PR, no Teeth

Yesterday, Google announced a Firefox version of their Google toolbar. I was an avid user of their Internet Explorer version of the toolbar when I formerly used that software abomination. In fact, the loss of the toolbar was one of the last remaining things keeping me from switching to Firefox.

Unlike some, I utilized most of the features that came with the toolbar, as opposed to simply using it for searching. I found the form auto-fill to be the greatest creation ever, including the ability to save credit card info. The display of search words was also fantastic.

Once I switched to Firefox, I ended up finding googlebar, combined with Autofill and Spellbound to be an adequate substitute. The latest beta development version is even better, with gmail notifier added, as well as some nice localization support for maps and such. I do not have any use for the pagerank feature, but if I did there is an extension for that as well.

Now, back to the announcement. I was very excited to hear that Google had an official version of their toolbar ready. I installed it and gave it a try. However, I ended up being less than impressed. In my opinion, it just simply isn't ready for prime-time yet, and I think they need to put some additional effort into development. I think if they waited this long to release their own, they should at least attempt to support all of the features of the IE version, and why not pick up some of the cool additions that the googlebar had implemented?

My first annoyance was the lack of separator bars in the toolbar, or any ability to add my own. The icons all seemed to run together. The gmail icon was there, but it did not include notification of new messages, making it mostly useless. The form-fill is included, but for some bizarre reason (probably privacy related) it does not handle credit card info. Also, the drop-down list available from the Google image itself was nearly useless, as opposed to the very useful list when clicking the "g" for the googlebar. Finally, the translation feature was horrible. You have to specify one language that will be translated, and it worked very poorly. There are numerous better translators available as extensions for Firefox.

The only feature I found somewhat interesting was the AutoLink features that linkifies street addresses, shipping information, etc. This is really cool and I would like to see it incorporated into googlebar or a separate extension. Should be fairly trivial to implement these using Google's published API's.

In the end, I uninstalled the Google toolbar and went back to the googlebar. You are probably thoroughly bored with this whole discussion by this point also. I will say in Google's defense that they still list this toolbar as beta (hey, isn't everything Google a beta?) Also, I like the fact that they kept a link to the googlebar right on their main toolbar site. It is small, but at least they acknowledge its existence.

Now, let's see if Google puts in the extra effort, or if the googlebar team instead polishes the few remaining edges and removes any need for me to use the official version.