Even if you’re not an AOL user, an AOL toolbar can be useful. Beyond offering quick access to AOL services and features, the AOL Toolbar also comes with useful features of its own that may encourage you to add it to Mozilla Firefox. It offers a collection of menu items that appear as a graphic bar within Firefox.
Like competing toolbars from Google and MSN, AOL Toolbar offers a convenient field for entering text and performing Web searches. Like the best toolbars, the AOL toolbar highlights your search text within its displayed results, even highlighting text in different colors when searching on multiple terms — one for each color. This is helpful when you’re trying to interpret the context of a search “hit.” The toolbar also offers search options to look for images, audio, video, shopping, news, and local information.
Like AOL Explorer, the toolbar can suppress pop-up ads. You can choose to allow all pop-ups to appear, block all pop-ups, or allow pop-ups from sites that you designate. No surprise, the toolbar offers one-click access to AOL services and channels with default options to access AOL yellow pages, maps, shopping, stock quotes, weather, white pages, travel, city guides, and more.
The toolbar also includes a useful “Clear Footprints” feature that allows you to selectively and efficiently erase Web browsing information such as your browsing history, stored cookies, browser cache, and blocked pop-up list. While you can perform many of the same tasks in Internet Explorer, AOL’s feature is much easier to access and operate.
The AOL Toolbar is a useful one, but it does lack some features found in competing toolbars. For example, both the Google toolbar and MSN toolbar can remember and store personal information and automatically fill in Web forms. And compared with other popular toolbars, AOL Toolbar doesn’t offer comprehensive customization features to change the size of buttons and fonts or rearrange the location of buttons and options.
In short, there are many choices out there, and AOL’s toolbar is a decent entry that, while competitive, will mostly appeal to users of the company’s services.
