Yesterday the new MSN Toolbar Suite (beta) was made available and finally I got five minutes to go through the download. Here’s my quick thoughts:

- Please lose the Real method of making home page and search pages changes default checked. It’s a sleazy software installation practice. If users want to change their default search to MSN or change their homepage then they can easily check that box.
- very cool how it can highlight the search engine terms on a page and in the search results. Though it does look like a highlighting OD when a lot of terms are searched


- the same sort of highlighting appears in the search results

-Wow, check out the cool viewer option in the toolbar (see screencap along the left)! That will break down the number of times the search term appears on the page as well as colorize and block out the various components. They are really making these toolbars snazzy, nice job MSN Toolbar team!
- I like how the MSN Spaces ‘blog it’ is integrated like Pyra Labs did with their blog button, very handy! I haven’t tried actually blogging to my MSN space yet, but I like that they didn’t forget to include.
- haven’t demoed the desktop search component yet, though I did notice that it won’t index Outlook 2003 unless it’s running (which most of the time I keep it running)

All in all it seems like it has all the features users expect in a toolbar these days like popup blocking, form fills, highlighter (not sure how that’s exactly used yet) and the addition of the cool viewer for drilling down and really seeing if a search result is just spam or meaningful, related content.

Scoble is pointing to all kinds of MSN Toolbar Suite comments in the blogosphere about this, if you want to check in there or run your own Feedster search. I’m sure after I have much more time working with this I’ll have more to say as well. Got to run though shortly there’s an MSDN event at the Sheraton in Tacoma today and I’m hoping to be able to attend.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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