Google cancelled its toolbar
Google cancelled its toolbar that the Company provides presently to Mozilla browser Firefox. Moreover, the toolbar provision for future versions has also been discontinued. This Google decision has left Mozilla scrambling in an attempt to assist its users who may be facing difficulties due to this cancellation. In addition, Mozilla has postponed all its plans to launch the upgrade for its browser.
Services provided by Google toolbar
The Google toolbar offered several services to the users. These include a search box to find information, methods to use the stored bookmarks on a server, and a technique to measure the Page Rank of a particular web page. The Page Rank is useful to understand the search-ability of a particular web page in a search operation query. Google has announced that all these services will be discontinued for Mozilla Firefox.
Google toolbar incompatibility creating problem
During the last few years, the development in the web browser technology has seen significant advancement. Several Google toolbar features available were built in to the Firefox browser, which made it extremely simple for users. Going forward, the Google toolbar compatibility will be available for Firefox version 4 and below. Google toolbar will not be supported in the Mozilla Firefox version 5, which is discouraging a large number of users from upgrading their browser. Mozilla is trying to find a solution for this situation and has set up a meeting to address the same.
Dual problem faced by Mozilla
Firefox release manager Christian Legnitto said that several of the web browser users were not upgrading to Firefox 5+ due to its incompatibility with Google toolbar. In addition, the company now faces a dual problem. One is to send the message to Firefox users that the toolbar update will not occur and secondly assisting the users to extract the additional information stored on the toolbar. The problems are accentuated by the short notice provided by Google to discontinue its toolbar. The last date for compatibility with Firefox has been announced as 1st August 2011.
Firefox rapid release cycle
The update of Firefox has always been troublesome for those who provide add-ons with the browser. However, the nature of these problems has changed because Mozilla releases a new browser version as frequently as every six weeks. The problem has been overcome by the Company bumping the add-ons compatibility for those that do not create any trouble.