Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Yahoo is trying hard to fight its suffocating competition. One of its latest efforts is its new browser toolbar. This new toolbar is in its beta stage. This time Yahoo has made its new toolbar available for FireFox too. All the other version of Yahoo toolbars were limited to IE. We can install the older versions only in IE; now with its latest toolbar, Yahoo has gone one step ahead by coming up with a compatible version for FireFox. This effort may be a reflection of losing popularity of IE due to security vulnerabilities. The number of Firefox users have increased tremendously recently.

Yahoo has introduced a number of new features which makes this toolbar worthwhile to be installed. Some of the new features include, Site Previews. However, it does not mean that it has no drawbacks, interestingly, this toolbar is not compatible with Windows 7. Making Yahoo toolbar compatible with Firefox and incompatible with Windows 7 raises many questions. Is it Yahoo’s way of fighting Microsoft’s competition or limiting itself access to thousands of users that would otherwise use this toolbar in Windows 7? This is debatable and Yahoo has to decide how it would like to move its coins. Also there are complains that Yahoo toolbar crashes with IE 8 as well. After the intervention of Yahoo technician, the IE 8 bug was fixed. However, it still does not work with Windows 7. This is indeed a nice twist.

One of the interesting features of the new toolbar is “Preview and Go”. This feature has drop down menu that resembles Web Slices of Internet Explorer 8. This feature allows us to take a peek into other websites without leaving the page that we are currently visiting. In case we are dealing with multiple email accounts that are web based, we can easily check our inboxes using this feature. Other similar uses include observing the stock market, news articles, eBay listings etc. This feature is a good competition for IE’s Web Slices as it is limited to IE. Now that Yahoo has made its Preview and Go feature compatible with Firefox it has wider usage. This toolbar has integrated Inquisitor which is considered to offer one of the best search engine experiences. Using Inquisitor integration it is possible for us to search in sites like Flickr, Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. We can add as many as sites as we like to the Inquisitor list to make our searches fast and easy in custom destinations.

The new toolbar installs itself fast and very user friendly. This time Yahoo has put in a lot of thought to make its toolbar worthwhile unlike its previous attempts. We need to wait for Yahoo to make its toolbar compatible with Windows 7.