Well, anyhoo, somewhere along that route, I discovered Google's Toolbar. I can't leave home without it. I find myself using it for direct searches for Images, News, Maps, I'm Feeling Lucky, and Site Search. I use all of them daily. One of my objections to the Chrome browser is that you cannot do the same even considering their "magic" search box/address window. Sure, I can type in a search and have those options displayed, but I still have to click through rather than get there directly.
So, I've pretty much been letting Firefox update itself without thinking of the consequences. It isn't perfect - it's a memory hog and will eventually have to be killed to regain it. I leave my laptop on for hours and hours, and Firefox will act up if I don't reboot. So, perfect? No. Plus, the newer versions have been becoming worse hogs - 3.6 would snarf up 300 to 450k, and 4 point whatever would go to 600 k or so easily. Plus the plug in container.
Then there was the new and improved version five, which kinda threw all the developers out there on their heels because it followed the release of v4 within three months. It was even more of a memory hog - I'd see 700 or 800k all the time. Plus very few of my plugins worked.
That really wasn't so bad, Woot Watcher I missed - I'd had to do some mods I found on the Innertubes to it to get it to run on v4, but the real kicker was Google didn't have an update for their Toolbar. Okay, then, it won't be long.
Well, no.
Plus 5.0 was kinda buggy for me - mostly when I'd scroll down, it wouldn't stop. After a while, that gets old, so with no plug in and extension updates forthcoming, I went back. Turns out 4.0 is not available for download at Mozilla dot org, so back to 3.6 it was.
Of course, now all my old stuff works, and life is relatively good. So what about the future? Will v5 get an update that stops the endless scrolling for me? Will Google finally put out an update for their Toolbar?
As to the second part - no.
Google has canceled its toolbar for the current and future versions of Firefox, and Mozilla is scrambling to help users who might be left in the lurch and postponing their browser upgrades. The toolbar offers a variety of services, including a search box, a way to use bookmarks stored on a server, and a measurement of a Web site's PageRank--a score Google gives that measures its influence in Google search results. But Google has chosen to do in the Firefox version.
"As we all know, over the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation in the browser space. For Firefox users, many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser. Therefore, while Google Toolbar for Firefox works on versions up to and including Firefox 4 only, it will not be supported on Firefox 5 and future versions," Google said this week on a help page.
Mozilla is looking into options for what to do next, setting up a meeting to address the matter.
"We know that a large amount of users are not taking update offers to 5+ due to Google Toolbar incompatibility," said Firefox release manager Christian Legnitto in meeting notes. "Many users likely expect a new version of Google toolbar to be released and marked compatible."
I can get search engine plugins for Firefox that would approximate what I had. There is just no way I'm aware of being able to do the same thing in Chrome without the extra keys strokes. I'm not real wild about never updating this browser, either. We've seen how well that works with the average user who won't update IE and the problems they encounter.
Damn.
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I loved Firefox and all its toys. Alas it got too big for my old computer to run. I use Chrome now...not particularly fond of it, but the comp will run it so...
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