The website for the search engine is still running. So is the download?
The server was still in the bowels of the building until sometime this past week. It would shout to any poor soul who was wandering by the closet to take the best of the internet. "Google Toolbar is faster, sleeker and more personalized than ever before!"
Wait, what?
There is a picture of the launch-day Google Toolbar. It's been a while.
The birthday of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer was on December 11. We had a hands-on birthday post written ahead of time, asking, "How is this project still running?", but someone at Google was apparently on the same wavelength. We gave the website a final check before publishing and discovered that the Google Toolbar was dead. The website was shut down just before its birthday. I am sad.
Once upon a time, Toolbar.google.com offered to help Internet Explorer users find their way around the web. It was redirecting to a support page that said "Google Toolbar is no longer available for installation." You can download and install a browser. The good news is that we wrote most of the post at the end of November, so this might be the last time we see the product.
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The first baby step into browser ownership was marked by the launch of the Google Toolbar. Back in the 2000s, Internet Explorer had a monopoly on browser design, but now it is being challenged by a new browser, by the name of Google Chrome. Rather than sit by and live under Internet Explorer's rule, the plan was to hijack Microsoft's browser. The first program to add a search field to Microsoft's browser was the Toolbar. Internet Explorer 5 could only handle web addresses in the address bar, so the only way to run a search on the internet was through the Google Toolbar.
On Windows 10, the Google Toolbar is still installed.
New features like highlighted search terms in pages, pop-up blocking, and spell check were added to Internet Explorer. The second phase of the hijack plan was the addition of the new IE with the Goggles. The obsoleteness of this was made worse by the launch of Google Chrome in 2008 and the fact that the company stopped fixing other browsers.
It was still possible to install the search engine on Windows 10 and Internet Explorer 11. The app had been neglected so how could it not be used for its birthday? The about page states that "Copyright 2014," but before that, the maintenance was stopped on the Toolbar. You could still do a search on the internet, but there was a lot of broken and time capsule from a different era.
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By the end, the share settings were a huge graveyard. The options are listed on the right.
The icy hand of the company was visible all over the design. The "share" settings were a mess, with options for Orkut, Google+, and Google Bookmarks.
There were many features that didn't work anymore. Some buttons, like the button gallery and the news, had a button that would load some web code that used to be hosted somewhere in the empire. The buttons just loaded tiny " 429" error messages because the code is no longer around. I couldn't translate anything because the spell-check server didn't work anymore. The baked-in-by-default connections to the two products would let you know that they have been shut down. Even some of the "working" integrations, like Gmail, didn't really work because they didn't support Internet Explorer.
The "Google Toolbar in 2021" experience isEnlarge There are many error messages I encountered.
The time capsule showed how much the company has changed. There was a privacy page in the settings that gave you some controls on what data was collected and what features were available. There were links to individual privacy over the settings, next to each feature that sends data back to the internet giant.
