Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Google Toolbar 3 Released
Google released their Internet Explorer toolbar in version 3. Firefox is not supported. With the toolbar comes a PageRank indicator, a pop-up blocker, autofilling of forms, and a variety of search functions. You also have a “Browse by Name” feature where you enter the name of a site right into the address bar.
But all of these features were available in version 2 already. What’s new with this release? Three things, all of them good enough to make some Firefox users want to go back to Internet Explorer:
- WordTranslator: Activate this feature to hover over any word on the page to have it translated. For example if you set your translation to “German”, you can then hover over the word “dozen” in a page and see a tip with the German word “Dutzend” next to it. Translation is available for Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, German and Spanish. An extremely useful feature.
- AutoLink: With this feature enabled, certain unlinked web page information will turn to links automatically. The kind of text triggering this will be US addresses, Package Tracking Numbers, ISBNs, and Vehicle Identification Numbers. This is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft’s Smart Tags, which they failed to introduce some years ago... except it looks much less like a backdoor for advertising, and more like a useful feature instead. You can test this feature on the Google address page, where now the street address turns to a link to the appropriate location on Google Maps (talk about the Google OS taking over our lives).
- SpellCheck: Using this button, you can spell-check any web form you are entering text into, and optionally, auto-correct it. This is handy if you’re working with a webmailer or blogging software, or if you leave a lot of comments on other forums and blogs.
[Thanks Gary Price.]
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