A nod to Microsoft in that they used the new version of their MSN toolbar 1.2 to finally dispense tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer. Now I’m wondering where do I fit this in the IE toolbar area when I already have Yahoo, Alexa, Netcraft, etc?

Simple solution is to start deleting but I like each of these toolbars for different reasons, so picking one over the other isn’t quite so easy (though I know each vendor would probably like me to only use their toolbar):

-Yahoo? My Web is a powerful way to manage your bookmarks using Yahoo’s server. You can share these bookmarks with others as well. For this function alone, I use the Yahoo toolbar.
- Alexa? Quick and easy way to get Alexa traffic ranking for any site and to run Amazon book queries for ISBN numbers.
- Netcraft? Anti-phishing, find out what hosting company a website is using as well as a ranking function. For whatever reason this toolbar would not co-exist with MSN toolbar version 1.2. I had to uninstall Netcraft in order to come up with memory errors every time the toolbar was loaded. When I uninstalled it left a missing spot in the context menu (see screenshot above).

More early thoughts on MSN Toolbar with tabbed browsing:

• the addition of tabbed browsing is very cool, works well for a small number of tabs and is better than nothing at all
• How do I get rid of the other MSN toolbar? I’d rather have the tabs only without the toolbar but it seems to be a package deal only … ?
• the tabs aren’t dynamically sized like Firefox does, in that when you get more it ends up adding a right/left arrow instead of resizing all tabs to fit the area (see picture below)

I’ll have more to say on this later as I use it more. I’ve been using the MSN Deskbar search on my tablet and really like it.

• Netcraft Toolbar protects against phishing attempts
• Netcraft toolbar now for Firefox
• Alexa study: 329,008 to top 100,000 list in two months
• Netcraft toolbar adds Risk Rating
• Some programs removed from default install Compaq
• Compare Alexa Rank with BlogCompare v0.3