Google Blogoscoped

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Broken AdSense

I’m repeatedly seeing a very broken Google ad on pages that discuss the Google Toolbar (see above screenshot taken from this page viewed with Firefox 2, which displays a 250x250 mixed image/ text AdSense at the bottom). It almost looks like Google mixes an image ad of theirs pushing the toolbar with regular text ads by others (is that new?), but their ad neither fits the space, nor can it find the requested image. It’s very rare to see a buggy AdSense ad, if that’s what this is.

New Google Toolbar for Firefox

Google released version 3 of their Firefox Toolbar. Google says this release brings everything the latest Internet Explorer toolbar had, and more, including custom buttons, bookmarks, and Google Docs integration.

I’ll stay far away from this release because the last time I had the Google Toolbar running on Firefox 2, it crashed the browser dozens of times a day (through a Google bug, or a Firefox bug Google exposed, either which)... and I wasn’t the only one experiencing this, either. Besides, FF2 has a native spellchecker – including dictionaries for different languages –, direct search from the top, and the ability to include a third-party PageRank extension, so that makes Google’s Toolbar redundant for me. But if anyone is brave enough to install this one on FF2, please share your findings...

[Via Google Blog and Ionut in the forum.]

Update: Brian Rakowski in the comments writes that installing this version 3 of the toolbar should be safe (quote HTML-ified):

I’m the product manager for the Google Toolbar for Firefox and wanted to shed a little light on this issue. There is a known bug in Firefox 2.0.0.0 where Firefox hangs on Intel Macs particularly often, but also on other platforms.

It’s going to be fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.1 which is scheduled for release next week. We found that the PageRank feature of the Google Toolbar seems to exaggerate this problem so we put in a workaround for the Version 3 Beta. The workaround doesn’t solve the problem but it tries to dodge it. This should become irrelevant once people get Firefox 2.0.0.1 but we didn’t want our users to suffer in the mean time.

Update 2: Cs19 in the forum says the problem persists, albeit on a much lower rate.

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