Somewhere last week, a dusty, forgotten server was still buzzing in the bowels of Google headquarters. “Take the best of Google everywhere on the web!”he would have screamed at any poor soul that roamed the darkened pantry. “The Google Toolbar is faster, more convenient and more personalized than ever before!”
Wait, what?
December 11 marks the birthday of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, which Google inexplicably left running for nearly 21 years. We say “almost” because we pre-wrote this hands-on birthday post asking “how is this project still running?” but someone at Google was clearly on the same wavelength. We did one last check before posting and found that the Google Toolbar is dead. Google shut down the site sometime last week, shortly before its birthday. TEAR.
Once upon a time, Toolbar.google.com offered to guide any wayward Internet Explorer users on the web with the power of Google. It now redirects to the support page with the message “Google Toolbar is no longer available for installation. Instead, you can download and install Google Chrome.”The good news is that we wrote the bulk of this post at the end of November, so this may be the latest online introduction to a dead product.
The Google Toolbar was launched on December 11, 2000 and marked the company’s first move to acquire a browser. Today, Google creates end-to-end browser design with Google Chrome, but back in the 2000s, Internet Explorer had a solid monopoly. Instead of sitting back and living under the dominion of Internet Explorer, Google’s plan was to take over Microsoft’s browser with various plug-ins. The toolbar was first, and it added a big, flashy search box to the Microsoft browser, yelling to users, “Start Google search! (And maybe click on the ad).”Internet Explorer 5 could only handle web addresses in the address bar, so the Google Toolbar proved to be quite handy, allowing users to search Google from any page on the web.
It also fixed the long-forgotten Internet Explorer with new features such as highlighting search terms on pages, blocking pop-ups, spell checking, autocomplete, and Google Translate. Phase 2 of the hack plan was Google Gears, which augmented IE with new APIs for web developers. Eventually, Google stopped fixing other companies’ browsers and launched Google Chrome in 2008, making it all obsolete.
Until a week ago, it was possible to install the Google Toolbar even on Windows 10 using Internet Explorer 11. So how could we not launch it for our birthday? To say that the application was ignored is to say nothing. The Info page said “Copyright 2014 Google”even though Google had definitely stopped servicing the Toolbar prior to that. You could still search Google and you could still log into the Google toolbar, but so many things were broken or a time capsule from a bygone era.
While Google Grim Reaper managed to avoid the toolbar for a while, the company’s icy hand was visible throughout its design. The “sharing”settings were a bloodbath, list options for Google Reader (killed July 2013), Orkut (killed September 2014), Google+ (killed April 2019) and Google Bookmarks (killed September 2021 G.). There were also search shortcuts for searching Google Blogs (killed May 2011) and Picasa Web Albums (killed May 2016).
There were also a ton of features that no longer worked. Some buttons, such as the Google Toolbar “Button Gallery”and Google News, had drop-down user interfaces that loaded some piece of web code that used to be hosted somewhere in the Google web empire. That code is no longer there, so those buttons were just loading tiny “429”HTTP error messages. The spell check servers were no longer working and I couldn’t translate anything. The default built-in connections to Google+ and Google Bookmarks will also tell you that these products have been disabled. Even some of the “working”integrations, like Gmail, didn’t really work because Gmail no longer supports Internet Explorer.
Google’s toolbar approach to privacy was another time capsule that showed just how much the company has changed. There was an entire “privacy”page in Settings that listed in plain English the data that the Google Toolbar collects and provided some controls for those features. In addition, in the settings, next to each function that sends data back to Google, there were separate links to “privacy”.