Toolbar Tips

Graywolf points out in his recent entry, that Google documented in their 2005 Patent filing a mechanism to use bookmark information to determine page relevancy.

This, in conjuction with the recent news about the government subpeona against Google to provide them information, demonstrates the sort of privacy concerns that exist in using browser toolbars that save and store information on a remote server, out of your control.

When you save bookmarks using simply your browser’s bookmark feature, the bookmarks are stored only on your local computer.

But when you use a service like Google’s new bookmark tool in the new version 4 of their toolbar, you are sharing (permanently perhaps, even if you can “remove” them) a record of the types of sites that you view.

You may feel like you have nothing to hide, but it’s good to keep in mind.

Google has recently released version 4 of their toolbar.

There are a number of new features in this version (and thus the Beta designation):

Enhanced Search Box
As you type into the browser’s search box, matches to what you’ve typed in so far will appear in a drop-menu below the search box along with the number of results for each suggestion.

Customized Buttons
Create your own custom buttons, which can perform special functionality based on what page you’re viewing or which text you have highlighted. Google has a directory of buttons that have been created for many differrent applications, or you can create your own.

Bookmarks
Google will now allow you to store bookmarks on their server which you can access from any computer. A Google account is required.

Email Page
You can share web pages via email, text message, or blog. The entire page you’re viewing can be sent in a message or posted to your blogger account.

Google Account Access
Now you can quickly gain access to your google account through the toolbar. Google accounts are used for Gmail, Adwords, Adsense, and other Google services.

Privacy
As always, you should be concerned about your privacy when using a browser toolbar as information about your browsing activity may be sent to the developer of the toolbar. When you first launch this toolbar, you are presented with a privacy screen. Be sure to read this, and if you enable “PageRank” checking, you should know that all the pages you view will be sent to Google. See the Google Toolbar Privacy Page for additional information.

Additional Features
Of course all of the old features of the toolbar exist, such as a pop-up blocker, form auto-fill, autolink, spell check, search term highlighting, search history, and more.

The Google toolbar can be downloaded here.

Microsoft has a web developer toolbar available for IE, designed to help web professionals analyze, develop, and debug web pages.

According to the Microsoft Website, the toolbar has the following features:

• Examine and modify the document object model of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Resize the browser window to a specific screen size.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help align objects on the page

Tools like this have been available as Firefox extensions for as long as Firefox has been around. Microsoft seems to be playing catchup with this and the features of their new IE7 Beta.