Windows Live Toolbar

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

~ the eulogy ~

windows live toolbar showed up on my internet explorer window somewhere in the 2006 through 2008 window. bundled with something, probably an msn messenger install, probably a windows live essentials wave i clicked through without reading. still. i did not install it on purpose, it was already there, sitting under the address bar with a bing search box that microsoft was still calling msn search when the toolbar first shipped.

this happened more or less globally, ie was still the dominant browser through 2008 and microsoft was leaning on that install base to move msn traffic. the toolbar's core job was to put a search box up top with instant results as you typed and sync your favorites across machines through your windows live id. a row of buttons for msn content shortcuts sat on the right side. it was the microsoft answer to the google toolbar, which had shipped four years earlier and had a bigger installed user base.

i was on ie6 through most of the ttnet years, moved to firefox 3 around 2008, so my exposure to the microsoft toolbar was maybe eighteen months of it sitting on top of ie6 while i was reading donanimhaber and checking mail on hotmail. by the time i had switched browsers the toolbar concept was already starting to feel dated. firefox let you uninstall it in one click, chrome refused to run any toolbar at all when it shipped in september 2008.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

this part i was not really tracking at the time. the windows live toolbar was a rebrand of the msn search toolbar, which itself had shipped in 2005 as microsoft's response to the google toolbar's success. the first live-branded release came out in the wave 2 batch of windows live essentials, which is when microsoft tried to unify all the disparate live services under one identity system.

by the time wave 3 shipped in early 2009, the toolbar had picked up an integration with onfolio, a research clipping tool microsoft had bought from jj allaire's team back in 2006. still. onfolio let you save web pages for offline reading and annotate them, with a clip-and-share flow that could send the annotations by email or push them to a blog. the whole feature got quietly retired by august 2008 before wave 3 was even done shipping.

~ the rebrand ~

this happened more in the microsoft product roadmap than in any user's daily browsing. bing launched in june 2009 and the whole windows live search bar was suddenly out of place, still labeled around msn and windows live rather than the new brand. wave 4 of windows live essentials shipped on 30 september 2010 and dropped the toolbar entirely, the replacement was bing bar 6.0.

microsoft ran a windows update push in august 2011 that automatically upgraded windows live toolbar 14 installs to bing bar 7.0 without user interaction. that was the mechanism microsoft used to retire the old brand, the toolbar just quietly became a bing product on the next patch tuesday cycle. the standalone windows live toolbar download page was pulled off live.com on 31 march 2011.

~ what it left ~

this part you had to be paying attention to the browser wars for. bing bar itself hung on for another few years inside enterprise ie deployments before quietly retiring as edge shipped in 2015 with no toolbar concept at all. chrome had already killed the toolbar as a browser feature by refusing to support the extension shape ie had used. firefox followed on the same path with webextensions in 2017.

the msn search toolbar and its windows live successor sat inside a bigger dead category of software. anyway, the browser toolbar as a business model had come out of the yahoo companion era and then become an aggressive install channel for adware and search hijackers through the mid-2000s. it collapsed once chrome shipped with its own bar built into the browser chrome itself. microsoft's official version was cleaner than the ask toolbar or the ie-hijacker adware layer, but it was still the same category, and the category was over.

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