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Upate 9:40 a.m. PT--I clarified the partnership terms for companies that want to bundle the toolbar.

Yahoo announced a partnership with Acresso Software, which develops the InstallShield software installer product, that the companies say will make it easier to spread the Yahoo Toolbar.

The Yahoo Toolbar augments browser possibilities.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Through the deal, it will be easier for the 71,000 software organizations using InstallShield to bundle the toolbar into the installation process, the companies said Thursday. Of course, software companies still must want to bundle the toolbar, but the Acresso option makes that easier to do if they so choose.

The Yahoo Toolbar adds abilities such as pop-up ad blocking, Yahoo Mail notification, bookmark centralization, and some spyware protection to Internet Explorer and Firefox, the two most widely used Web browsers.

Perhaps more important in Yahoo's effort to remain competitive with Google, the free download also features a search box.

I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for so long that Internet Explorer looks strange to me on those odd occasions when Windows Update or some other automatic Windows setting opens it. There are lots of reasons Firefox is my browser of choice, not the least of which are the great free add-ons for the program that neither IE nor any other browser can match.

Topping my list of Firefox extensions is NoScript from InformAction and Giorgio Maone. The fact is, I'm so accustomed to NoScript that Firefox wouldn't be Firefox without the little blue "S" in the bottom-right corner (sometimes with a red slashed circle, indicating that a script on the current page has been blocked). The extension lets you control which scripts run on the page, so you can allow those from the hosting site, but block those from ad networks, for example. NoScript is free to download and install, but it's donationware, so if you try it and like it, consider contributing a few ducats to the author to show your appreciation.

The NoScript extension for Firefox gives you more control over the type of content web sites can run automatically.

Get a look at that link before you click
It's always perilous to click a link to an unknown site: You never know what kind of popups or other dirty Web tricks await. The Cooliris Previews extension shows you the destination of a link when you hover the mouse over the small blue-and-green Cooliris icon that appears to the right of the link when you highlight it. You can also use the extension to prefetch Web sites, and you can change the preview action from mouseover icon to mouseover link, clicking link, clicking icon, or pressing Ctrl as you mouse over. The options dialog (which opens when you right-click the blue checkmark icon in the bottom-right corner of the Firefox window and choose User options) also lets you customize the options that appear when you right-click selected text in Firefox, allowing fast searches via the service of your choice, and sending links via e-mail, among other options. Another nice feature of the latest version 2.6 of the extension is the ability to view Google and Yahoo image-search results as a slideshow.

Preview links in Firefox by seeing them in a pop-up window when you mouse over them via the Cooliris Preview add-on.

Maximize your PDF-download options
More and more Web searches return PDFs, but downloading the files and opening them in a separate application can interrupt your browser workflow. Nitro PDF's PDF Download add-on lets you decide whether you want to download the file, view it in your Firefox window, or view it as HTML (as long as it isn't copy-protected). After you install the extension, you see a pop-up menu whenever you click a PDF, giving you the option to download it as normal, view it in Adobe Reader or the FoxIt PDF plug-in, or open the HTML version of the file.

Get more options when you click a PDF file with the PDF Download extension for Firefox.

Shift Firefox into high gear with Fasterfox
No matter how fast your Internet connection, the Web still makes you wait. You can cut the time it takes web pages to load with the Fasterfox add-on that automatically tweaks Firefox's settings to retrieve data from Web servers more quickly. Or right-click the program's muscled-fox icon in the bottom-right corner of the window and click Options to tweak your browser settings manually (choose Custom under the Presets tab to show tabs for resetting the extension's Cache, Connection, Pipelining, Rendering, and Popups options). The add-in also displays the load time for the current page.

Click the Custom option under the Presets tab in Fasterfox's Options dialog to view more tweakable performance settings.

Among the performance settings you can adjust with the program are memory cache capacity, disk cache capacity, DNS cache entries, DNS cache expiration, the maximum number of connections (total and per server), the max number of persistent connections, the max number of pipelining requests, the number of pages stored in memory (for faster Back and Forward page loads), and initial and submenu paint delays (for faster initial page loads, and submenu loads). Fasterfox also lets you disable those sneaky pop-ups that use a Flash plug-in exploit to get around standard pop-up blockers.

Tomorrow: Is free remote-PC access too good to be true?

Do you consider yourself to be a privacy aware Internet user? Are you concerned about your security online?

You've installed antivirus and spyware software, which you also keep updated. You regularly update your operating system for any security patches. You have a firewall on your home computer and have locked down your home wireless network with a WPA2 password. Most importantly, you've ditched Internet Explorer and jumped on the Firefox bandwagon.

Your job is done, right? Think again.

While installing Firefox (and not using IE) is one of the most important steps users can take towards a safe online experience, Firefox is (alas) not totally safe out of the box. Luckily, Firefox provides a very flexible framework for open-source programmers and commercial vendors to create their own software add-ons for the browser. A number of these software extensions fix critical design flaws in Firefox--or simply improve transparency so that users have a better idea of where they are and which sites they're interacting with. I've selected a few of the best ones, which I highlight below.

... Read more

When you work in, on, or around the Web, you tend to collect tools. A site here, a toolbar there...you really can't help it. Here's a total must-have for your SEO toolbox...but don't tell the developers and designers.

Chris Pederick's Web Developer browser extension.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

The Web Developer extension from Chris Pederick is a hugely popular and useful tool for Web developers and designers everywhere. But this browser add-on is an equal-opportunity tool that should be in every SEO's toolbox as well for quick snapshot views and reviews of sites. It will require the use of one of the following browsers, Firefox, Flock, Mozilla or Seamonkey, but will run on Windows, Mac OS X as well as Linux, and it's free.

While you may find many uses for the extension beyond SEO and even more SEO uses than listed here, below are some of the top ways to put it to use. The best way to follow along though is to first install it, view a site that you are familiar with, and then try some of the methods listed below:

Disable Tab

Disable JavaScript.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Select Disable JavaScript and reload the page and browse the site. Does that fancy drop-down navigation still function? Can you click on all the links? If it doesn't and you can't, then guess what...the search engine spiders probably can't get there either.

Images Tab

Is all that great copy on the page really text that the search engine spiders can eat up and use for indexing the pages, or is it really just a bunch of images? Select Disable All Images and you'll quickly find out.

Displaying alt attribute text.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Use the Display Alt Attributes feature to view the alt attribute text of all images on a page. You should do this to make sure that none of the images has been stuffed with keywords, which won't help in ranking and doing so may actually hurt rankings.

While text is best for navigation and links, if images are used for this, it's especially important to make sure the alt attributes contain the textual equivalent to capture any value the search engines may give to images used for links.

Information Tab

Select View Link Information to view all the links on a page. Are there more links on a page than you thought? If this is your site, are there any links leading out to sites that you weren't aware of?

Use View Meta Tag Information to quickly see all the meta information for a page to make sure that each page has a unique, keyword-rich and relevant description.

Use the View Response Headers and check the 404 Error page of a site by going to a page that doesn't exist, like yourdomain.com/errortest and make sure that it returns a 404 Error and not a 200 "OK" response.

Miscellaneous

Linearize the page.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Use Linearize Page to see the order of content based on how search engines will read the content. Is the most important content toward the top or buried at the bottom? Does the content read logically, or are "paragraphs" all jumbled because tables have been used poorly to lay out the content?

Outline

Select Outline Headings and Outline Current Element to see whether HTML headings have been used (e.g., H1, H2, etc.) to help highlight important page elements. Headings will be outlined and when you mouse over them (or any element), you'll see the HTML trail in your toolbar, identifying the HTML tags because of the Outline Current Element function, which will allow you to see whether the heading tag is an H1, H2, or other tag.

Options

Persist Features.

(Credit: chrispederick.com)

Bonus...for a little known but very useful feature, select Persist Features if you want to click-through to different pages of a site while maintaining some of your selections, like outlined headings and displaying alt attribute text as you move from page to page.

While the Web Developer extension won't stop the need for a deep dive into a page's code--there's also a View Source feature for that too--it will satisfy and simplify many of the routine tasks associated with a quick SEO review.

Galleries of images set off against a black background have become common as software and Web sites try to help people show off their photos better. Cooliris' PicLens offers a clever way to do set up such galleries from many Web sites on the fly.

a view of PicLens in action

(Credit: Cooliris)

The PicLens browser extension can convert a bunch of images from Google and Yahoo image search, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and RSS Media-based sites and other locations into a full-screen gallery of pictures. The photos slide by at a stately pace or advance when the user clicks the keyboard's arrow key, and a handy filmstrip across the bottom aids in jumping to the photo you'd like to see.

The first 1.0 beta version worked only on Apple's Safari browser on Mac OS X, but a new version 1.5 beta released this month now works on PicLens now works with Firefox on Windows. In addition, with the new Safari 1.5 release, PicLens for the Mac now is out of beta.

I found the software worked on Firefox, but imperfectly. The on-screen controls were missing the first time I used it, though they appeared after a reboot. I couldn't get it to work with Picasa Web albums. The interface could use a button to exit.

And alt-tabbing to switch between applications seemed to send PicLens into a zany limbo zone. Apparently the software won't yield control of the screen to other applications, but the mouse and keyboard interact with whatever software is hidden underneath. If you alt-tab back to PicLens/Firefox, though, you can resume using it or hit the escape key to exit.

One disappointment--and it's not really PicLens' fault--is that low-resolution previews such as the default Flickr photostreams look pretty coarse when scaled up to full screen, but the full-size images that can be found through Yahoo image search, for example, can take a long time to download. And because of the aforementioned screen-hogging issue, you don't have much choice but to wait or exit.

(Via John Nack)