Things on the move with Google Docs

Jan 28, 2008 12:11 GMT  ·  By

With the growing popularity of Google Docs, the dev team needs to make haste with their efforts to attract and, more important, maybe, keep the visitors and turn them into users. The "all on the Internet" is enough only for the first part mentioned above, so they've got a lot of work laid ahead of them.

Partnering with Firefox to make the search engine the default homepage of the browser turned out to be one of the greatest ideas that ever popped up in the Googleplex. The support of the open source community behind Mozilla or just lending a helping hand really turned out benefic for the Mountain View-based company because of all the extensions that have been created.

Google Docs Bar is such an extension and it features the option to view the list of documents in the sidebar, while being able to search for a file with the built-in "mini-search engine", to view only one tab, with either documents, spreadsheets, presentations or a certain folder. And all that with no security liability! The credentials are being sent directly to Google, who then stores them in Firefox's password manager.

In related news, one more addition has been rolled out, which greatly decreases the time needed for giving access to shared docs. A button is now there for the clicking, entitled "Share", and after you select all the documents you wanted, you just use this and the job gets done. No more having to open every single document and after that selecting the share tab and the people to share with. Whether those users that you just allowed access to your docs are only to view them, or are to also edit them is still entirely up to you, just pay attention to the box you click.