Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo today announced the release of its new browser toolbar for Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox (as a beta), bundled with some new features that lets you add icons for your favorite Yahoo apps and Websites.
The polished plug-in offers a number of new features, including access to Yahoo’s My Apps, with previews to things like Yahoo Mail, Weather, News, and non-Yahoo sites like eBay and People.com.
“The new Yahoo! Toolbar empowers users with greater customization features and offers improved access to the information you care about most from not just Yahoo! Sites, but from sites like Flickr and Wikipedia” says Burke Culligan, Senior Director of Yahoo Front Doors.
One of the new features of the toolbar is a “preview and go” feature. When you click on the icons of your favorite site, you get a drop-down preview window, showing real-time info of your mail, stock quotes, or news feeds without having to shuffle between those sites directly.
“Customize your toolbar with dozens of apps from Yahoo! and across the rest of the web, so you can check on your multiple email inboxes (Yahoo! and AOL), your eBay listings, the latest news from People.com or USA Today, stock portfolios, and even your local weather or movie showtimes,” suggests Culligan.
The coolly blended Yahoo toolbar is also fully customizable and can be loaded with web apps available online. This feature allows you to add from a large Websites or apps you want to keep handy. And for those who have installed the previous version of the Yahoo toolbar, you might also recall that the toolbar was previously available only in IE6-up. It is only now that Yahoo is launching a specific toolbar made specifically for Firefox.
The new Yahoo Toolbar also comes with a faster search tool. It incorporates some search application from Inquisitor, delivering a refined query suggestions as you start typing, search history, and the ability to directly search other sites from the search box.
Users can also customize the toolbar easily by including and removing apps. You can choose from the apps in Yahoo’s gallery, add your own, edit the layout, and customize your search settings.
The new Yahoo Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox (beta) can be downloaded from here.