Google Finally Killed Its Internet Explorer Plugin, 'Google Toolbar'

Ars Technica's reviews editor remembers how Google Toolbar launched back when Internet Explorer "had a rock-solid monopoly" on December 11, 2000, and marked Google's first foray into browser ownership. "Rather than idly sit by and live under Internet Explorer's rule, Google's plan was to hijack Microsoft's browser with various plugins." Once upon a time, Toolbar.google.com offered to guide any wayward Internet Explorer users across the web with the power of Google.... It also patched up long-neglected Internet Explorer with new features, like highlighted search terms in pages, pop-up blocking, spell check, autofill, and Google Translate. Phase 2 of the hijack plan was Google Gears, which augmented IE with new APIs for web developers. Eventually, Google stopped fixing other companies' browsers and launched Google Chrome in 2008, which would make all of this obsolete.
But it ended as Google finally pulled the plug this week on "a dusty, forgotten server" that had spent nearly 21 years blurting out "Take the best of Google everywhere on the web!" Now, it redirects to a support page saying "Google Toolbar is no longer available for installation. Instead, you can download and install Google Chrome." The good news is that we wrote most of this post at the end of November, so this might be the Internet's very last hands-on of the now-dead product....

To say the app had been neglected is an understatement. The about page read, "Copyright 2014 Google," though Google definitely stopped performing maintenance on Toolbar before that. You could still do a Google Search, and you could still sign into Google Toolbar, but so much there was broken or a time capsule from a bygone era....

The "share" settings were a bloodbath, listing options for Google Reader (killed July 2013), Orkut (killed September 2014), Google+ (killed April 2019), and Google Bookmarks (killed September 2021). There were also search shortcuts for Google Blog Search (killed May 2011) and Picasa Web Albums (dead May 2016)....

The spell-check servers didn't work anymore, and I couldn't translate anything. The baked-in-by-default connections to Google+ and Google Bookmarks would also let you know that those products have been shut down. Even some of the "working" integrations, like Gmail, didn't really work because Gmail no longer supports Internet Explorer....

One feature that really blew my mind was a button that said, "Turn off features that send information." Google Toolbar apparently had a one-click privacy kill switch back in the day.

Sounds like ...

[PPH]

... my friend with the workshop and pegboard with all the tool outline stencils. He said it was really handy once his kids became teenagers. You could clearly see how many tools you used to have.

No one cares.

[Pierre Pants]

Literally, no one. Not even the few idiots who somehow still use Internet Explorer.

Re:

[evanh]

That'll be the point of the article. There was a time when many did care ... and oh how times change.

For myself, this is the first time I'd heard of that toolbar. There had been a whole other world I never experienced - one that involved using IE. ;)

Re:

[thegarbz]

Literally, no one. Not even the few idiots who somehow still use Internet Explorer.

No one cares that it's dead. But I find this story to be probably the most compelling on Slashdot today. It has history, it has intrigue, it makes you wonder why the hell it was still running, it's a view into the past of a company, and also has a hint of what it means for online software to rot over time.

Ask Jeeves

[flyingfsck]

Maybe someone with an Ask Jeeves toolbar would still like to upgrade to the Google one.

Compare the Pair

[dohzer]

[Microsoft discontinues support]: Google keeps supporting a platform nobody uses as long as they can.
[Software/Service/System people use]: Google suddenly decides to terminate support.

Internet Explorer

[backslashdot]

As a big fan of enterprisy stuff and being all corporate-like, I for one was sad that Microsoft axed Internet Explorer. I hate how quickly web sites render in these newfangled so-called modern browsers. The quirky formatting and reduced responsiveness gave the web sites of old a certain je ne sais quois feel to it. Fans of vinyl records and cassette tape know what I am talking about. I believe we will see Internet Explorer make a comeback the same way vinyl records are now selling more a than ever. I also think we need to bring back Java Applets and Flash which were working fine before Steve Jobs dissed it.

Re:

[bug_hunter]

I would say the one thing the current HTML spec at is absolutely horrible at is... making web pages.

I wonder what the web would be like if there were more standard layout components that made sense, e.g. main menu, sub menu, card, tabs etc.
Stuff that you pretty much do with tech like Bootstrap, but if it was standard it would give the browser and user so much more freedom on how to render things.

Maybe such a solution would have stuck web tech in a certain time frame, but it's always seem bizarre to me that

Still missing one Google Toolbar feature

[andot]

There was really good feature in Google Toolbar. Search words on toolbar. If you searched my good neighbor for example, then on toolbar appeared buttons "my" "good" "neighbor" so you can directly search word from the page. It made searching for information so much faster. Then Googlebar Lite came out to implement it. No it is dead too. I kept my Firefox from updating for years solely just to use Googlebar Lite search. It is so annoying to type all the search words twice. First at google and then again into

You can't kill what's already dead

[Virtucon]

I worked on a contract two years ago for a company that still supported IE; a large commercial product suite used by over 4000 US/Canadian companies. IE is the zombie of browsers and you'll never kill it.

Re:

[ncc74656]

At work, we have people who report their work with clients to a state-run website that still runs on Silverlight. You can't even download Silverlight from Microsoft anymore; the page that hosted it returns an error. We had them launching the site with a batch file on the desktop that would open the URL in IE. About a month ago, it quit working for some unknown reason. We were able to get them going again by tweaking the batch file to open the URL in Edge, which in turn was set to open the site in its "I

I hope they preserve

[Your Anus]

The Bing bar