Google Toolbar Gets New Features

Today Google announced a couple new features for the Google Toolbar in Firefox. The first one is the addition of a "new tab page."

This feature allows you to open different pages when you open a new tab, so you don’t just get the standard blank white page. Now you can bring up one of your favorite pages or one that you recently viewed. You can choose from up to 9 different thumbnails you have stored as well as recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs:

"You can edit the thumbnails, and all this data remains locally on your browser, which means none of the information about your most viewed sites or recently closed pages will be sent back to Google," explains Software Engineer Sergey Ryazanov of the Toolbar Team. "If for whatever reason you don’t like this updated new tab page, you can always change it back to a blank page or to the website of your choice through either your Toolbar or Firefox settings."

To edit your thumbnails, simply:

1. Open a new tab to view the new tab page.

2. Click the Edit thumbnails link near the bottom of the page.

3. Click the X icon for each thumbnail you wish to remove.

4. Click the Done button.

The second new feature of the latest toolbar release is the ability for Hebrew and Arabic-speaking users to access Toolbar 5, which includes right-to-left text support. Google also notes that some widely reported bugs have been fixed, though they don’t go into specific detail on that.