14 DAY TRIAL // While steering clear of toolbars is for me a key part of a sustaining a “healthy browsing” experience, I’m giving the new Bing Bar a chance. Microsoft has re-engineered its toolbar from scratch and dubbed the result of the overhauling process the Bing Bar.
It’s immediately visible that the redesigned suffered by the toolbar are not mere cosmetic changes, but that instead they run very deep under-the-hood.
The software giant architected an evolution from a simple toolbar to a dashboard designed to be the heart of the users’ most common Cloud activities.
“We took a back to basics approach for this release, guided by one key principle: make the stuff you do every day online easier,” revealed Joshua Schnoll, from the Bing team.
“We took a look at what makes our customers happy, how people use our products, and where they spend time online. The feedback was clear. People want an easy way to stay informed about the things they care about (such as Facebook, email, breaking news, weather and traffic).”
Watch the video embedded below to get insight into the work that was necessary to build the Bing Bar, Microsoft’s strategy, highlights of the actual features and capabilities, as well as information on how other users reacted when trying it.
Personally, I continue to believe that even with the extra search functionality delivered by the Bing Bar, such as highlights for search history, suggestions and deep links, having two search boxes at the top of the browser is a bit redundant.
One advantage with the Bing Bar however, is that the toolbar lets users perform searches without actually leaving the current page, which might prove to come in handy when all they want is to verify a piece of information, and not actually perform a full search.
For some users, the excellent Facebook integration featured by the Bing Bar could be the one thing that wins them over.
The toolbar delivers notifications, but also easy access to the user’s Facebook account, including News Feeds, Photos, Friend Requests, Messages, and Alerts. Customers can even post comments, status updates and abuse the social network’s Like button right from the Bing Bar.
One feature that I particularly like is mail integration. It’s extremely easy to get all my email accounts with Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail centralized into a single place, with the Bing Bar providing notifications of new content arriving in my inboxes, for example.
“Each of the different buttons has several notification states. In addition to Facebook and E-mail alerts we also provide short alerts for breaking news (with a short summary of the headlines), weather advisories (like the Winter Storm Warning below), translation alerts (when there is web content available for translation), new Bing Rewards offers and much more,” Schnoll added.
Some users are bound to love the way that the Bing Bar can simplify their life by being context-aware. Whether it’s to let them know that they can set up email accounts, or to provide translations of content, or a map to a specific destination, the Bing Bar can make it a lot easier for users to do more while browsing with less clicks.
The Bing Bar is available for download here.