Yahoo Releases Firefox Toolbar Beta

eWarz writes "Following Google's footsteps, Yahoo has released a beta version of it's toolbar for Firefox. The new toolbar is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux."

my bad

...and all this time I thought the toolbar was a virus or spamware.

Does this mean...

Does this mean they have figured out how to port spyware to linux/MAC?

I'm not the only one I'm sure

I read the headline to this article and I just couldn't figure out what a Firefox toolbar was, let alone why Yahoo would release one.

Perhaps a better headline would be "Yahoo toolbar beta for Firefox"

Mozilla support

What they should do is release a toolbar for Mozilla Suite as well and not only Firefox.
And Google needs to release the toolbar for Linux.

Though, even if they did that, I'd still continue using Opera :)

Yahoo Releases Firefox Toolbar Beta

Yahoo Releases Firefox Toolbar Beta and quickly finds out that no one uses because of the already implemented search toolbar in FF. Thank you, I have enough sites reading where I'm going, without Yahoo! doing it for every site. Yes, I realize that Y! probably doesn't do that, but the features on the Y! toolbar don't appeal to me at all. I don't need Y! mail, because I use gmail, and I use Google instead of Yahoo because I hate the sponsored results. And somebody please reply and tell me whether or not they're actually putting the popup blocker in...

Re:Yahoo Releases Firefox Toolbar Beta

If you hate sponsored results, you must hate Google more then Yahoo. Because there's more sponsored results in Google search results than Yahoo.

Re:Yahoo Releases Firefox Toolbar Beta

You should try the toolbar. It has a number of handy features. The "Save to My Web" button is very handy, as are the Yahoo Bookmarks. I also like having the "Translate Page" button for pages in languages I don't know. Also nice to have an "Add to My Yahoo" button for RSS feeds. The integrated Calendar support is handy as Sunfire still isn't quite there yet.

All in all, it's got something for everyone.

Possessive/contraction

It's = It is Its = belonging to it

Complete Story Debugger Output

Fatal error encountered, aborting reading!

Line 2: fatal basic grammar error (illegal possessive apostrophe).

Yahoo has released a beta version of it's toolbar for Firefox. The new toolbar is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

A solution is available for your error: go back to school.

For future reference, see this document [wsu.edu].

How many toolbars do we need?

You know, if every popular website/search engine released some sort of toolbar to be added to your web browser, it might make it a bit difficult to see the actual content of the website we're viewing,... When does this all end?

I mean, currently in Firefox, I have the FF Bookmark toolbar, the BioBar (a FF add-on for biomedical research; PDB, etc), and the google toolbar. Now they want me to add the Yahoo! toolbar?!?! Please!

Now, a Slashdot Toolbar could be pretty cool, on the other hand,... ;-)

The Firefox bandwagon...

Q: How many users prefer Beta Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox over Google Toolbar for Firefox?

A: Both.

Re:The Firefox bandwagon...

The Google toolbar is mostly useless, but the Google Suggest extension [google.com] is cool shit. It hooks into Firefox's built-in search box.

Darn

Wanted to try this out, but install fails with my nightly Deer Park build. A few other great extensions have too, so maybe it's time for me to switch back to 1.0x...

My Yahoo

The only Yahoo! specific thing it does is the My Yahoo system of adding pages to a central server so you can take "favourites" with you between computers. The Yahoo search is an easy addition to the site searcher (defaults to Google, easy to switch), and the rest of it is just duplicating the bookmarks system. I'll ignore the "anti-spyware" stuff because that's Windows specific.

At least Google's toolbar does stuff like reporting PageRanks. This one seems to be bloat for the sake of getting a Yahoo logo onto your desktop.

Everyone else is doing it..

Come on Microsoft, how about an MSN toolbar for Firefox? ;)

Resource Hog!?

Every single time the Yahoo Toolbar gets installed on one of my PC's at home I have nothing but trouble with the resources afterwards. The last time it snuck onto one of my computers at home was with the Macromedia Shockwave install. I've banned it's use and installation in my house. Anyone else have the same experience with this particular toolbar?

making a better search engine is too hard

so we shall make fluffy user-tracking products instead

Similar?

http://toolbar.yahoo.com/firefox [yahoo.com]
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox [google.com]

Yahoo! Toolbar --> Beta ---
Google Toolbar BETA

coincidence?

Why are the download buttons both on the right of the screen (I know it can be anywhere, but not many sites before google seemed to put buttons on the right hand side like that).

Before you link to 100 different sites with the download button on the right, how come the hotmail login has moved to the right hand side of the screen only since gmail did it.

It seems they are hinting at a google layout (not that this is a bad thing, nor that google owns two column web page layouts), it just seems a bit strange?

Re:Similar?

You seem to be implying that Yahoo is copying Google. I can't believe I'm defending Yahoo, but this Google cheerleading has got to stop.

Yahoo released the beta version of their Firefox toolbar in February, months before Google Toolbar.

Yahoo has had the login on the right side of the screen [yahoo.com] for as long as I can remember-- 1997 or so?

You just got to love...

... competition working at its best :-) How long has Yahoo been dragging its feet about this? Low and behold - a week after Google Yahoo releases its own. Did they think Firefox wasn't important before that? Who knows - but it's clear that Yahoo is losing the race, especially when it comes to being an innovative company that continuously wins the hearts and minds of geeks like us :-)

old newz

Following Google's footsteps, Yahoo has released a Search Engine"

Resource Hog!?

I've had nothing but trouble with this particular toolbar in the past. Every machine at my house that it's been installed on seems to all of a sudden have resource issues. These are not slow machines either. The slowest is an AMD 1.5 GHZ with 1 GIG Ram. I remove it and the machine is right back up to *snuff* as it were. The last time it made it onto one of my machines was inside the Macromedia Shockwave install. I've since banned it's use in my home. Has anyone else had this type of problem with this toolbar?

WHAT?? Yahoo! Toolbar was first.

Seriously guys, this yahoo bashing google loving is pathetic..

This was released Feb 2005 ..
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000077.html [ysearchblog.com]

Googles was released this month ( I think, double check that )

And yes, i do work for Yahoo, but these are not the opinions of my employer.

Re:WHAT?? Yahoo! Toolbar was first.

Sheesh. I work at Google, and I agree. Give us props where we deserve 'em (and, IMHO, we deserve a lot of them :) ) but Yahoo got their Firefox toolbar out first. It's a fact.

Deal with it already and stop rewriting history, Slashdot!

(not opinions of my employer also, blah blah blah)

And those of us using safari

And those of us using safari, still don't care. A yahoo toolbar will be a great idea when Yahoo becomes a worthwhile place to visit for something other than yahoogroups, internet poker, and webcam girls.

Yahoo's search doesn't match Google

Unfortunately, as much as I like Yahoo's other real estate (mail, calendar, etc.), I gotta say that I won't be installing it. Their search, from what I can tell, is now primarily for paid listings only. We've had our company's web site up for 3 years, with Google spidering it completely every day and it has a Google Page Rank of "5". Yahoo only just in the past week added our front page. Of course, that's tiny anecdotal evidence, but to me, that says a lot about the quality of Yahoo's search.

From Yahoo's blurb

"Protect yourself from spyware with Anti-Spy for Windows"

First it's the anti-virus industry totally ignoring Mac and Unix users. Now Google and Yahoo leave Mac and Unix users to swing in the wind. Does anyone have anti-spyware for something other than Windows?

I don't want to have to switch to Windows just to get this support.

Yahoo just don't get it.

Googles success has came from innovation, simply copying everything Google does from revamping their search to be exactly the same to this doesnt have the same impact.

yahoo

i hear this and i just wonder why is yahoo releasing this toolbar for mac and linux when the rest of the site pretty much requires IE?? iirc you can't even play any games from linux(i dunno about mac) and everytime i try to play games from firefox my firefox crashes!!! i personally will not use this plugin(and anything else from yahoo) til they support other browsers and platforms....btw i wonder if google would add a games section

I really don't get this ...

The purpose of using Free Software is to be FREE from corporations/individuals that wants to tell you what you can do with your computer and what you can't, and still, many companys keep releasing proprietary software for Free plataforms, If i wanted Proprietary software, i woudln't be using GNU/Linux. In certain cases where they release some software for which there is no real Free Software alternative, i can see they know they will have a marketshare (It's still ethically wrong, but i understand it), but when they release such a trivial piece of proprietary software like a toolbar, to run on very big developments that are completely free, and where there are alternatives to that specific software (There are thousands of Free toolbars for Firefox), i don't see how someone would install it.

Yahoo, Google, {another big company}

What is the news here? Yahoo did it because Google did it. And then also most of big players will - it is like race in features - we got that, they also etc. etc.

But actuall I find some smaller sites to be promoting FF. Like biggest polish dictionary providers (encyclopedia, dictionaries etc. etc. former communist monopoly) have provided search plugin for FF... That is interesting. It is like they really find FF more convinient themselves so they suggest it for use with their services - not "me too" stuff.

Too many deja vu experiences on /.

how is this news? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/11/002920 4&tid=154&tid=95&tid=1 [slashdot.org]

Worst dupe EVER!

Not only is this a dupe [slashdot.org] that of a story from like four months ago, but the story submitter appears to have not noticed the dates and therefore confused who is in who's footsteps.

...yet another toolbar?

Y?

And following Google's footsteps...

And also following Google's footsteps, Yahoo started Yahoo Mail, as well as Yahoo Maps, and Yahoo News.

Seriously, they have a lot more stuff which has been released before Google, and more updates can be found at their official blog http://www.ysearchblog.com/ [ysearchblog.com] which is much better than Google's official blog.

But why?

But what are these toolbars (both Google's and Yahoo's) really good for? It seems that they give the user the power to "search directly from the toolbar" and similar things. But Firefox already has a search field in the default address toolbar! It seems to me that they are only taking up screen real estate.

I'm not trying to troll, and I'm glad to see that corporations are acknowledging Firefox in this way -- I've just never understood why anyone would want to use these toolbars. Does someone use this, and can he or she clarify, in that case?

Has anyone tried it under Linux?

I tried it on several systems long ago (it's been out for many months as others have noted), and again recently (a few weeks ago after the 2nd or 3rd slashdot announcement) hoping that it was a newer version - nope.

Anyways, the reason I ask is, it works fine on the windows machine I'm forced to use at work, but it complains that it can't load images and does absolutely nothing under the several Linux systems I've tried it on (various releases of Fedora).

The _only_ thing I want it for is the portable bookmarks.

Has anyone seen this actually work in Linux?

Has anyone seen a fix for this bug?

This is completely old news

The Yahoo Toolbar was posted quite awhile ago. How else would you explain the Yahoo Toolbar's 7 PageRank while Google's Toolbar is only 0? I mean, like, duh.

This was released five months ago

See the press release [yahoo.com]

I installed it, tried it for a few days, decided I did not use it and disabled it a good while ago. Now Slashdot gets round to telling me its available. How would I keep up with whats happenning without /.'s timely news aggregation.

Hack to install on Deer Park 2?

I'm using the Yahoo Toolbar on both my Windows and Mac boxes so I can share bookmarks. It's also nice to share my bookmarks live between Firefox and IE.

But Yahoo Toolbar won't install on Deer Park 2 (aka Firefox 1.1 alpha 2). It complains that "0.5b" is not a valid version number.

Can I hack the version string somehow to allow it to install? Change it to "0.5.0" or something?

James

What about their other products?

Does this mean other features such as LAUNCHcast will be ported over as well?

The toolbar breaks built in toolbar customization

After installing The 0.5b Beta toolbar in Firefox 1.0.6, I noticed that when I tried to customize the toolbar's built in to Firefox that I could not click and drag items that were already in the toolbars. I could add items to the toolbar, but not move or remove them. Basically the toolbars never switch into customize mode; they stay in normal mode (where they can't be modified).

Disabling or removing the Yahoo toolbar fixed the problem.

I guess that's why they call it a beta.

OSS Yahoo! Toolbar Redux

Considering Slashdot has managed to dupe a five-month old story [slashdot.org], I figured I'd dupe my five-month old comment [slashdot.org]... One update: The Community developed OSS Yahoo! Companion for Mozilla website is currently way out of date. To get a current version of the toolbar, go to the mailing list archives. The latest build should be attached to one of the mid-July emails.

As one of the more minor members of the community-created Yahoo! Companion for Mozilla [mozdev.org], I'd like to point out that there is another option if you distrust/dislike the official version.

Peter Buergner, Dave Viner, Brian Kennelly and a host of others have created an excellent alternative for folks who like the functionality of the Yahoo! Toolbar but prefer Firefox/Mozilla. The current version (0.54) is a bit out of date - a new version should be hitting the servers soon. It is much further along than the official version, with full internationalization support (including Chinese), disposable address support for Yahoo! Mail, the ability to remove the Search Box (a function the official version has apparently removed from both the IE and FF versions) and a few others.

I've looked at the official source code and it's nicely written - probably a bit cleaner than ours, truth be told. We've had quite a bit of discussion on the mailing list about adding features not found on any of the official toolbars (including dynamically folding the Yahoo! bookmarks into the Mozilla/FF bookmarks, the ability to redirect menu selections into new tabs, and a bunch of other stuff). Recent "nightly" builds (more like weeklies, but hey...) have included about:config support for some optional functionality.

Most of us on the Companion team are happy to see official support for Firefox by Yahoo!. It shows that FF is really gaining traction, and will help a lot of Yahoo! users to migrate to the FF platform. Hopefully, most the of the newbs will use the official version (saving us some headaches on the mailing list), and when people want to step up to a more feature-rich version, they can upgrade to our version. One thing the team has been very concerned about is making sure that our version works on all Mozilla platforms, and in both Firefox and Mozilla Suite. Early word is that the official version works best on Firefox on WinXP - there seem to be minor problems using it with the Mozilla Suite, alternate themes and non-XP platforms (the code is all generic Javascript, so I expect those issues to be easily fixable). Our 0.54 build has some issues in Linux due to an improper set of permissions added to a directory it creates to store the Yahoo! feed. This has been fixed in the nightlies, or you can fix it by modifying the permissions of the yahootoolbar_saves directory in your Firefox profile (chmod 666 should do it).

Of course, our version could end up dying in the shade of the official version, but that's competition for you!

p.s. I know a lot of /.ers prefer the Google toolbar, but lots of us have already invested a lot of time in the Yahoo! version and don't feel like switching. Besides, Yahoo! as a portal (currently) has a lot of things Google just doesn't provide - I track my portfolio there, have a My Yahoo! portal page with a lot of localized content, like the quick links to my local sports teams, etc. And, at this point, you've at least got to give Yahoo! credit for being the first to officially support the FF platform (though I have a feeling Google is going to come on very strong, given the recent hiring of Ben Goodger.)

Re:SlashWetBar?

I don't think there's a big market for toolbars that just repeat stories from a week ago.

Re:New Toolbar!

You know, I think Spybot S&D might remove that...

Re:Y! Toolbar for FF has been available for weeks!

Longer than a few weeks, since before June I do believe.

Re:retards

The Yahoo toolbar provides access to Yahoo! bookmarks, through which I can have the same set of bookmarks on all three of my daily use computers without having to email them to myself. If any of you know how to do that some other way, i would be interested.

Re:SlashWetBar?

If you want one bad enough, why don't you write one. That's what the googlebar people did before Google finally released a version for firefox.

Re:New Toolbar!

Same here. Isn't this story a dupe? Anyhow, the best thing about the toolbar is direct link into yahoo's MyWeb. Web based an managed bookmarks with an RSS feed. I absolutely love it.

Re:Yahoo cares ...

But will Google Toolbar work on Linux? No
To quote http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/index.html [google.com]

" System requirements: Windows XP/2000 SP3+, Mac OS X 10.2+, or Red Hat Linux 8.0+"

I can't be arsed looking up the rest of your claims.