Google Toolbar for Firefox Adds Useful Navigation Features

If you’ve used Google’s open source Chrome browser and appreciated the way it collects thumbnail versions of the sites you visit most on one handy page, but you tend to use Firefox most often, give the updated beta version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox a try. It’s a downloadable extension that you can get here, and there is also a video showing how it works. Its best feature is that it too will collect thumbnails of your most visited sites, a useful navigation feature.

Here’s how it looks and works.

As seen below, the Google Toolbar for Firefox collects thumbnails of your most visited sites in a way similar to how Chrome does so. It also collects your recent bookmarks and your recently closed tabs in one place. Especially if you tend to concentrate on a handful of sites throughout the day, these features make navigating faster and easier.  The toolbar also lets you jump straight to Gmail, search news sites quickly, and more.

In a post on the Google blog you’ll find information on many of the new features, and Google also has a Help Center for the Toolbar, with a Getting Started guide, details on browsing tools, and more. The Toolbar remains a beta project, and you can send Google requests for additions here.

Note that the thumbnail gathering is not supported in Firefox 2. You need to be running version 3 or greater.

The Google Toolbar for Firefox remains my default toolbar in the browser, and the new features are useful. Along with the speed improvements in the beta versions of Firefox 3.1, you can get things done faster.

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