14 DAY TRIAL // Google is speeding up the pace ahead of the holidays and various teams at the company are working to get what they've been working on out the door. The Google Toolbar is the latest to get an update and comes with a couple of big new features for Internet Explorer and Firefox. The biggest announcement is the new Share feature which does what its name suggests, it allows users to share web pages on a number of social networks, blogs or by email. The second feature is the My Location geolocation tool which made its way out of Labs and into the main product for the IE version.
“We've been busy working on even more ways to make web browsing easier and more fun. First off is our new Share feature in Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. This makes it easy for you to share any page on the web with your friends over various social networks, blogs or email,” Mina Radhakrishnan, Toolbar product manager writes. “With this new release, we've also "graduated" the My Location feature from Toolbar Labs. It's now available in Toolbar for Internet Explorer (Firefox already has a similar feature built in to the browser).”
First up, the Share feature. This kind of functionality is hardly anything new at this point, most sites, blogs and services have some sort of Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc., button to share the content on those sites. Now Google takes it one step further by building the feature into the browser enabling users to share any web page in the world to a comprehensive list of services including popular, and even not so popular, social networks, all manner of blogging services, by email through several popular providers and so on. The interesting thing here is that sharing a link with the toolbar is done using Google's brand new URL shortening service goo.gl.
The other big feature is the My Location tool which is now an integral part of the product. It enables geolocation features for Internet Explorer allowing websites and services to access your location data in order to provide a customized service or to add it to a blog post or photo, for example. This sort of functionality is still in the early days, but it is already built into Firefox since 3.5 launched. IE, as usual, is a little slow so Google built this feature to enable IE users to take advantage of the functionality as well.
Google Toolbar for Firefox is available for download here. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer is available for download here.
