So Joe…

I‘ve been using the IE Google Toolbar for some time, and have used it’s Google Bookmarks feature to store all my bookmarks. It is such a beautiful thing not to have to worry about bookmarks. They are just there, on any machine I use. One of my favorite features is that I can start typing the name of a bookmark, and it will suggest the name I’m looking for. This is critical when you have hundreds of bookmarks.

Now with Firefox, their are third-party extensions that can allow you to access your bookmarks, so at least their’s no importing/exporting going on just to get them into Firefox. The part that is missing though is the suggest when typing. Until now that is. Google just released the beta of version 3 of their Firefox toolbar (www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/). It has all the features of the IE toolbar, as well as the ability to link into their Docs and Spreadsheets.

I generally have been using IE because of the better Google Toolbar, and recently upgraded to IE7. I’m very displeased by the inability to customize the toolbars in IE7, they take up a ton of space (see previous post “IE7 Toolbars Create Poor First Impression“). With the new Firefox toolbar, I’m in heaven. I get all the benefits of the Google Toolbar, and it fully integrates into the Firefox browser. By fully, I mean each and every button from the toolbar can be placed in any Firefox toolbar, so you can completely customize your layout.

I’ve already started customizing mine, with an eye towards minimizing the space it uses. Here’s how mine currently looks:

Note that I use 1280×1024 resolution with the Google Desktop on the right side, so I’ve got about 1130 pixels of width to play with, but it would all still easily fit on a 1024 pixel wide display. I use TinyMenu to turn the menu bar into a single menu, Unified Back/Forward Button to give a single button that moves forward or backward, and Stop or Reload Button to combine those two buttons. I then dragged the navigation buttons I wanted to the menu bar, as well as the Google buttons I want, including the search box from the Google Toolbar. I turn off the text descriptions, and select the small icons, and I get everything I want in one toolbar that takes only 1/4″ of my screen, instead of the multiple toolbars in IE that don’t have all the controls I want, and locate them in a way I don’t find intuitive.

Notice that initially I didn’t include the address box. I like to just type my addresses into the Google search box and it takes me to the site, just the like the address box does. The one thing it doesn’t do is show you the current URL, which is useful if you want to copy the address, or see it for phishing info, etc. Because of this, I’ve added the address box as well, their’s enough room for it. I’ll look around to see if their’s another way of handling the address part, perhaps a plugin that displays the current address in the status bar.

With this recent addition to the browser picture, I believe I will now switch to Firefox as my default browser. It has all the functionality I want, and allows me to customize the layout as I please. Thank you Google for this long awaited upgrade!