San Francisco — Search titan Google Inc. today announced the release of an updated Google Toolbar for Firefox plug-in with a number of new features that surrounds it and in the offing brought the Mozilla created browser a step closer that gives the browser a prominent feature of Google’s own Chrome.
The new Toolbar — version 5 — adds a tab thumbnail feature that is similar to Chrome, when a users open a new tab instead of seeing a blank white page, the browser displays a page with up to nine thumbnail versions of pages you visit often.
This new beta version of Toolbar 5 performs the same for Firefox, including not just the thumbnail pages, but also the list of recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs based on your browser history that Chrome displays.
“You can edit these thumbnails, and all its data remains locally on your browser, which suggests that none of the information about your most viewed sites or recently closed pages will be sent back to Google,” explains Software Engineer Sergey Ryazanov of the Toolbar Team. “If for whatever reason you do not like this updated new tab page, you can always change it back to a blank page or to the website of your choice through either your Toolbar or Firefox settings.”
To edit your thumbnails, simply:
- Open a new tab to view the new tab page.
- Click the Edit thumbnails link near the bottom of the page.
- Click the Done button.
Click the X icon for each thumbnail you wish to remove.
Firefox can inherit Chrome’s new-tab behavior using a new beta of the Google Toolbar. (Credit: Google)
However, Ryazanov warns that the new tabbing feature does not work with Firefox 2 and may conflict with other Firefox extensions, so you will have to upgrade to at least 3.0 if you want to use it.