Google toolbar: yea or nay?

Factual Questions
21

I know the Alexa toolbar of long ago was a horrendous thing, and the Yahoo toolbar gets constantly installed without asking first (I hope they’ve changed that policy since), and both seem to be throughly annoying and resource heavy. But I’ve never found the Google Toolbar to be a big deal.

Having said that, I liked their button array a lot, where you could click them and it would search on the word you had in the field. But now they’ve changed the way it works, and it only goes to the front page of the site when you click the button, and you have to actually type the word again. What the hell? Why would I need buttons that do that on the Google toolbar, when I can (and do) already place the same links in my bookmarks?

They do have a dropdown to buttons which will do the action I want, but that’s non-intuitive and an extra click. I hate it.

22

I hate the idea of google keeping a complete search history from me.

Not to mention they can record all the sites I visit which use google analytics (which is quite a lot)

http://www.customizegoogle.com is a firefox extension which helps on both counts

23

Incidentally, for synchronising bookmarks across multiple machines with Firefox (even on a temporary “using a friend’s computer” basis), look no further than the Foxmarks extension. I’ve been using it for ages - I’m a heavy user of bookmarks - and it’s always worked perfectly and seamlessly.

24

Problems:

  1. It makes me sometimes lose right-click functionality.
  2. It is occasionally responsible for my copy of IE crashing.

This happens at home and at work…