Ive never been a big fan of installing 3rd party toolbars on my browsers. That is until I tried out the Google toolbar a year or 2 ago. Whenever I’m using IE, I usually install the Google toolbar. There are some features on that toolbar that I like to use, such as the bookmarks. The bookmarks feature of that toolbar allows you to maintain your bookmarks on several different PC’s, because its tied to your Google login and not your computer. If you reinstall your OS often, or use different PC’s thats a good feature to have.

When using Firefox, a lot of the features of the Google toolbar are available via extensions, so I don’t bother installing it for use with Firefox (I use both Firefox and IE7 when browsing). The only thing that doesn’t really jell with my browser use is that I use Yahoo Mail as my personal email (I do use Gmail for blog related email). With Gmail, I can install a mail notification extension in Firefox, but the Google toolbar doesn’t notify you of new email. That made me take a look at the Yahoo toolbar, which does have Yahoo mail notification on the toolbar.  Right now, I tend to just leave Yahoo mail open in Firefox. you’d laugh but when I log into my PC, I usually start out like this…

Firefox

  • Yahoo mail
  • Jonespc.com
  • Jonzee.com
  • Technorati.com
  • Google.com

IE7

  • Mybloglogs.com
  • Google.com/reader
  • logmein.com
  • Hulu.com

Yes, all of those tabs are open when I launch Firefox and IE7. Then my Browsing goes from there.

Get-The-Yahoo-Toolbar

The Yahoo toolbar actually share a lot of Google’s features. There are bookmarks, Spyware and popup blocking, email notification (Yahoo mail) and search from the toolbar. I know what you are thinking, who uses Yahoo for search. I don’t. Tried but always end up back at Google for search. Both Firefox and IE7 have its own search bar that I tend to use, and you can set just about any search engine as the default search with both of those browsers. The biggest benefit I see to using the Yahoo toolbar is the Yahoo mail notification, which is pretty important to me.

I cant stop using the Google toolbar just yet because of my ties with the bookmarks feature, but I think I will try out the Yahoo toolbar in Firefox to see how things work out. In Firefox, I use Foxmarks to maintain those bookmarks so I wont be missing out on that if the Yahoo toolbar doesn’t work out. I’m curious as to how many of you are using the Yahoo toolbar, and if you are interested in trying it out, you can download it here.