I actually ended up removing the FF search box entirely (using keyword searches exclusively instead) so I can use ctrl+L to do those and ctrl+K now goes to the google toolbar so that I can advantage of the autosuggest which is surprisingly useful as well sometimes.

Conduit.com – Free community toolbar Builder in a Few Easy Steps
http://www.conduit.com/

you forgot the Windows Live Toolbar http://get.live.com/

Best,
Sven

For instance, I love the google toolbar and have for years. Sure, I realize that FF (and now IE7) offers a search box, but that’s not all that the google toolbar does for you. Unfortunately, some of its best jewels are hidden gems, in that you need to enable them with the settings.

I use the “site” button every day (type in a search word and search what Google knows only about the current site). Sure, you can do it yourself with the site: keyword in the other browser search box, but this is much less typing over the course of a day. Same with searching google images (another button you can easily add), and froogle..

Then there’s the “up” button (again, you have to add from “settings”), which lets you traverse up a site, whereby it removes whatever’s at the end of the currently used URL. Often quite handy. Again, all things you could do yourself manually, but one click is nicer, and worth the toolbar space to me.

These and a few other things are tips I first shared back in 2003 (http://cfmxplus.blogspot.com/2003/04/have-you-got-google-toolbar.html).

And some features don’t use any “space” at all, as the toolbar also enables a context menu on each page you visit. You can right-click to see:

- backward links
- cached snapshot of page
- similar pages
- translate page

Again, all things you can do without the toolbar as long as you have a quick google search bar of some sort and know the corresponding keywords (link:, cache:, etc.). But again I use these every day, so I love not having to type those–plus some would learn of the features this way who might not ever think to learn the keywords.

If I have one complaint, it’s that I don’t understand why these last 4 features aren’t enabled as toolbar buttons (that can be added, optionally). I’d give up the space occupied by “send to” and “autolink” (though some may love those), and certainly “check” (the spell check) since that’s built into FF.

Anyone from Google (or others who might know more about this) care to comment?

Anyway, don’t dismiss toolbars (and the google toolbar) so readily. You may be missing out on more than you know.

/charlie

In my Firefox only toolbar is almost always showing is Stumbleupon, Web Developer is hidden and use then where is needed.

What bookmarklets do you use???

I don’t really care that much for “toolbars”; I prefer the tool “buttons” that open a menu below. Shareaholic does it nicely, and StumbleUpon allowed us to choose which menu items we wanted, so I only had 3 on the toolbar, making it very small. I then drug it into FF’s bookmarks toolbar, which has a few bookmarklets with keywords too long to make them convenient to type into the address bar. Most bookmarklets are buried down deep in my bookmarks, with easy to remember keywords to type into the address bar.

Many toolbars, and even FF extensions seem to be developed just to collect viewing patterns, so if there’s a bookmarklet option, I’ll choose that first, and sometimes a keyworded search gets me by.