Google Cancels Google Toolbar For Firefox

This may come as a surprise, Google has cancelled Google Toolbar for the current and future versions of Firefox, and Mozilla is scrambling to help users who might be left in the lurch and postponing their browser upgrades.

The toolbar offers a variety of services, including a search box, a way to use bookmarks stored on a server, and a measurement of a Web site's PageRank--a score Google gives that measures its influence in Google search results. But Google has chosen to do in the Firefox version.

"As we all know, over the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation in the browser space. For Firefox users, many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser. Therefore, while Google Toolbar for Firefox works on versions up to and including Firefox 4 only, it will not be supported on Firefox 5 and future versions," Google said this week on a help page.

Mozilla is looking into options for what to do next, setting up a meeting to address the matter.

In case that you already upgraded to Firefox 5 and wanted to make Google Toolbar work with this version, Mozilla released instructions on how to resolve non-working add-ons after Firefox updates.

If after trying the above steps and Google Toolbar will still not work and you're desperate to use it on Firefox, then there's no other option but to downgrade to Firefox 3.6 which is the last previous version still being maintained by Mozilla.

Firefox 5 has the following features built-in so you may no longer need to have Google Toolbar installed:

• Suggest is in the Firefox Awesome Bar
• Autofilll is in the browser
• Custom searches from the Awesome Bar
• Spell-checker
• Bookmark sync
• Search box

Those desperate for the toolbar--search-engine optimization experts are one group that particularly values the PageRank score--can use a version for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Although we would n't know yet whether Google also plans to discontinue the IE version.