I've started to notice something peculiar about the Toolbar team, and that's this: we literally can't seem to stop carrying the Toolbar around with us. When we moved to a new space in our Mountain View campus, we brought along a hallway-sized printout of it. For Halloween, eighteen of us dressed up as the different parts of the Toolbar itself.
And now with the latest beta release of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, my fellow product manager Avni and I couldn't wait to point out the new features.
Maybe it's on our minds, because with the latest version of Toolbar, you can save your settings online, and then get all of your bookmarks, custom buttons and AutoFill information from your different computers -- like when you're at home, or at work, or if you get a new computer for the holidays. It's kind of like carrying your Toolbar with you, but without the hassle of cardboard and string, and a lot more useful.
And, yes, there are some new reasons for you to carry your Toolbar with you, too.
You can accessorize with Google Gadgets: We first released custom buttons with search and feed functionality, and now we've added support for many Google Gadgets. In Toolbar, gadgets can even interact with the pages you're on, like with the Google Product Search gadget, you can just highlight the name of something you'd like to buy on any page and do a quick price comparison right there.
Google Notebook is built in: We realized that saving links as bookmarks to come back to is great, but not quite enough. So now you can collect text and images, too and put them into notebooks right from the Toolbar.
You'll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar "Did you mean" with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.
We still have the original Toolbar features, like automatic form filling, pop-up blocking and spelling correction, too, so give it a try and let us know what you think at http://toolbar.google.com/T5.
