toolbars

Sometimes online videos are so good that you want to download them so they'll always be handy. Video Downloader Toolbar is a Firefox extension that makes downloading videos as simple as clicking a button. In addition to its video downloading capabilities, it comes with a few optional features that are also useful.

The toolbar appears underneath the address bar in Firefox and has a Bing search box, a button for downloading videos, a translation button that uses Microsoft Translator, and buttons for StumbleUpon and Facebook. The video downloader is quite easy to use; simply navigate to the desired video … Read more

The Google Toolbar for Firefox is a free add-on for Mozilla's Firefox browser. It adds a toolbar to the Firefox interface that includes a field for Google searches as well as icons for quickly launching Google Mail, Google Earth, and a variety of other useful features.

The Google Toolbar for Firefox is easy to install, and most users will simply need to download and run the program and restart Firefox, though some may need to enable it in the browser's add-on manager. We restarted Firefox and clicked Tools/Add-Ons to open the Add-On manager. We clicked Options on … Read more

Google is listening.

As Marguerite Reardon and Tom Krazit reported on May 14 in CNET's Signal Strength blog, the search giant has swept up wireless-network addresses, along with other data its Street View vehicles have been collecting on their unprecedented world tour.

Google or some other company may have already plotted the location of your home or office wireless network, but you can make it more difficult for the next nosy megacorporation--or a neighbor or passing stranger--to discover your hot spot by disabling its Service Set Identifier (SSID).

By default, wireless access points transmit their presence to let wireless … Read more

7Stacks ports the Mac OS X stacking feature to Windows 7, Vista, and XP in a reasonable but not quite perfect manner. If you're not familiar, the "stack" jargon here refers to creating a container of folders or files and making it accessible with one click on your taskbar.

The program does an effective job once you've created your stack, but it lacks some of the smoothness that hallmarks its Mac progenitor. A clean design makes creating a stack easy, but what's not clear about the process is that the "Create shortcut on Desktop&… Read more

TV Toolbar is an add-on for Internet Explorer that provides links to legitimate, high-quality TV shows, movies, and more. Although the toolbar doesn't give you access to anything you couldn't find yourself, having the links in one well-organized place is an advantage.

The toolbar's interface is attractive and integrates well with Internet Explorer. Mouseover tooltips explain each of the icons representing the toolbar's major features. Users can select from lists of television channels, shows, and movies, and the toolbar will link to legitimate content hosted on the networks' Web sites or on sites like Hulu. You … Read more

It took a while to get used to the new Office 2007 interface. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, and the now-ubiquitous ribbon was a foreign concept. Hours sifting through menus and the Help file sometimes failed to locate familiar features from previous versions of Office. If you're having problems adapting to Office 2007, you may find that Classic Style Menus and Toolbars for Microsoft Office 2007 is exactly what you need to bring back that old familiar feel.

The program is deceptively simple. Once it's installed, users will find that their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint … Read more

A small thread on the Apple discussion boards talks about a problem one user is having with a small white rectangle appearing over the mouse pointer. It does not follow the pointer, but instead will just appear when the mouse is still and then may persist after the mouse has been moved.… Read more

Google plans to try its hand at the bane of many a Web publisher's existence: comment moderation.

Sidewiki is a new addition to the Google Toolbar that will let users read comments on any Web site and add their own in a special interface on the left hand side of the screen enabled by the toolbar. This idea has been tried before by others, but Google is proposing to use an algorithm to rank comments by quality and to link comments to a user's Google Profile.

Google has developed an algorithm that it says can filter out obvious … Read more

If you're the type of person who uses a lot of search engines and doesn't mind having a toolbar installed, you might want to check out Firefox Super Search. This Firefox-only add-on puts the power of 160 search engines in one toolbar, with about 70 that can be searched right from the toolbar itself.

If you're used to Firefox's built-in search box, this is a pretty big step up both from selecting one engine at a time and having to add additional engine tools from Mozilla's catalog. It's also laid out in a really … Read more