All bias aside, this is the first toolbar I’ve installed and left on my browser in a long time. I can’t say the same for the Windows Live Toolbar or the MSN Toolbar.
Bing Bar is a little different from most browser toolbars in that it provides a couple of really nice facilities over a brand new Silverlight driven user interface developed by Microsoft’s User Experience Research team.
Besides the obvious Bing search field, which provides intelligent filtering and both result & image previews, the Bing Bar adds a couple nifty things;
- Stocks Dropdown & Ticker – This is one of my favorite features. It displays a ticker of watchable stocks and when click on, shows a 6 mo history of the stock along with the company report.
- Email Update – Hotmail or MSN email users see when new mail comes in as the Mail button glows, and clicking on it produces a wide drop down that displays all recent emails. One can reply directly from the interface or start their own email.
- News & Weather Dropdowns – Single click views of today’s weather with the current weather displayed directly on the toolbar… or hot news stories sorted into one of 7 searchable categories.
- Autofill Manager – Manage the automatic entry of personal information from an encrypted store on your computer. Personal address, email, phone number, etc. all can be autopopulated into online forms if you choose using the autofill manager.
- Safety Center – A single location to manage all things Internet safety related including pop up blocking, phishing, and safe site designation.
Additionally, the buttons are dynamic: As new features are made available, they’re dynamically loaded up at run time so in the future you can anticipate seeing a lot more on the Bing Bar.
It’s a lot slicker than it probably sounds. Give it a try!
- DOWNLOAD: Bing Bar for Internet Explorer 6+ & Firefox 3+(Windows 7, Vista, XP SP2)
http://www.discoverbing.com/toolbar/ - VIDEO: “Discover Bing Toolbar”
http://www.discoverbingtoolbar.com/
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 