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Do you use toolbar with your web browser?
Toolbars for me are the thing of the past. Gone are the days when I used to try toolbars from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or AOL to be able to have features such as tabbed browsing, searching from the browser etc because back then such features were not a standard part of any of the available web browsers. Later Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and likes started pushing these toolbar just to get more market share in search as their respective search engines were built into the toolbars. This resulted in toolbars getting bloated with unnecessary features which halted our web experience. This was the time when I stopped using toolbars
Then came Opera and Firefox who in their newer versions of browsers added tabbed browsing, built-in search as the standard feature of their web browser. Microsoft later too added these features as a standard in Internet Explorer 7.
All this changed when a few months ago I was invited by Microsoft Connect to test out their upcoming Silverlight based toolbar. I tried a couple of builds of this toolbar and ever since then I have been using this toolbar and its now a part of my daily web browsing experience.
Last month MSN \ Windows Live team released the final bits of this toolbar. Its supported by both Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 however it will not run on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1. Based on Silverlight technology, the toolbar feature not only sleek & sexy look but its also very rich when it comes down to features. The toolbar allows us to search & browse the entire MSN categories from the browser without going to the msn.com site.
On the left we have a Live Search textbox to search the web(pretty useless for me because I rarely use Live Search but its a neat feature nonetheless). On the right we have 3 buttons; one for flip, next one for settings and the last one for help. The flip button flips(animated ofcoarse) the MSN category options into Live options.
Clicking on Windows Live brings out(animated) a sub menu for running Windows Live apps installed on the system.
Search box works very well. As soon as you search for anything, the MSN categories side flips into animation and transforms into options from Windows Live to assist in search as shown in the image above.
Color chooser is a nice touch and is now becoming almost a standard in all of the Windows Live apps. As expected, it allows us to colorize the entire toolbar into a color of our choice!
Being based on Silverlight techonology, the entire toolbar looks flashy and has got smooth animations on almost all mouse clicks.
Overall its a nice toolbar and the best looking out there and most importantly its light and doesnt slow down the web experience. I wish it had the option to change the search provider from Live to Google but oo.. well..
I’ll recommend you all to try it atleast once. Head over to toolbar.msn.com to download it!
