Google Toolbar

» see toolbar.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

google toolbar showed up in december 2000 as a small download for internet explorer 5. it gave you a search box that did not require visiting google.com first, plus the pagerank meter that every seo person of the era stared at like a holy relic.

by the mid-2000s the toolbar was on hundreds of millions of installs. firefox got a port in 2005. by then it was doing autofill and popup-blocking, with spell check and inline translation arriving along the way. for a couple of years the google toolbar was the upgrade that turned a stock IE install into something usable.

then chrome happened. by 2008 google had its own browser, and every feature the toolbar offered was being built directly into the browser frame instead. the firefox version was discontinued in 2011. the IE version limped along until december 2021, when google quietly turned it off and pointed users at chrome.

i used the google toolbar through the ttnet broadband years. on a fresh windows install you would download firefox first, then add the google toolbar. that gave you default-routed search without typing the url every time. the pagerank meter was the thing you watched if you cared about a site's ranking. for a while there was no other way to see that number from a browser.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

the toolbar was a search box with extras bolted onto whatever browser would tolerate it. autofill on forms, popup blocking on websites that abused them. translation tools that pre-dated google translate as a standalone product. a separate button took you to your gmail. the pagerank meter gave webmasters something to optimize for during the years when google's algorithm felt readable. sidewiki, briefly, let you leave comments on any webpage in the world. the web rejected the idea almost immediately.

~ how chrome made it redundant ~

chrome shipped in september 2008 with the omnibox. the omnibox was the toolbar's search box, except the entire browser was the toolbar. once chrome was the default on a machine, there was no surface left for the toolbar to occupy. the same engineers who had been shipping toolbar features moved to chrome and rebuilt them in the address bar.

by 2016 the firefox version was already gone. internet explorer was on its way out as a supported browser. the toolbar kept working for IE users into 2021, mostly because google never bothered to switch it off. when they finally did, the death notice was a redirect, not an announcement.

~ what got buried with it ~

the green pagerank bar is the thing people remember. it disappeared from public view in 2016 when google stopped exposing the score, but the bar itself had already become a symbol of mid-2000s seo culture. the rest of the toolbar's features all live inside chrome now, just without the toolbar branding. it is one of those products whose death is also a measure of how much of itself it left behind.

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