Now, I've had friends who've worked with the Ford Agency, and it's certainly a reputable institution and I like fine looking ladies just as much as my wife allows me to. For now, at least on our test system, regardless of the current search in the Search bar or whatever's on the current page, the YouTube gadget shows a selection of videos of fashion models from the Ford Agency. It doesn't appear to have any immediate bearing or contextual relationship to anything else the user is doing - which is easily the least common attribute of anything Google has ever done. What I don't understand yet is the gadget for YouTube. Simple enough, perhaps useful, maybe more easily replicated by someone who uses RSS more directly and more often. One of them is CNN, and that slice pulls up a list of recent headlines, probably from the RSS feed. After Toolbar 5.0, they read New Tab (as they do in Chrome).Īmong some of the other new features Firefox users will notice in Google Toolbar is something which has not yet been fully fleshed out: In an effort to match up with "Web Slices" in Internet Explorer 8, Google is adding a "button and gadget" button which lets you insert slices of content from selected partners onto your toolbar. Small enhancement: Normally new tabs in Firefox come up with the title (Untitled), which isn't a help to anyone, really. So if you haven't visited a page very recently, the New Tab page won't show you a thumbnail for it - rather, a "broken camera" icon. However, we did notice that when there's a page you don't want showing up in your most visited list, clicking on Edit thumbnails and clicking on the X that appears over that thumbnail not only takes the page off, but keeps it off.Īlso, the Toolbar's thumbnail images come from memory, not a recent read of the Web page contents. So it may take a few days for the feature to learn your habits and become truly useful. In our tests, we noticed that Google Toolbar is relying on its own list of "most visited" sites, which for the new user of version 5.0 will be the most visited since its own installation. Now, perhaps you were intending to type in a URL for some other site in that case, none of the rest of Firefox's functionality changes. With Google Toolbar 5.0 installed in Firefox 3.0.5, the question is answered rather quickly: By default, the New Tab panel will show your most visited Web sites as thumbnails, and you click on a thumbnail to bring up that site. "While it's good to not intimidate with an explosion of information, we can get a much more streamlined workflow - thereby saving huge amounts of aggregate time - by showing something. Even Mozilla Labs' own engineer Aza Raskin isn't thrilled with this behavior: "While clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be," Raskin wrote last August. In any event, one feature that most folks will agree is altogether impractical is the fact that a newly created tab shows up in Firefox completely blank. Okay, so maybe I'm not being too practical. I need the room for my.most visited sites. But not everyone keeps the "Most Visited" button visible on his Links bar I certainly don't. Mozilla Firefox already keeps track of the Web sites a user visits most often.