A9 Toolbar Out For Firefox
Amazon has released a version of the A9 toolbar for Firefox. Unlike other toolbars, A9's is crucial to the most important features of the engine, so you can see why they would feel the need to release more than one version. Google has been happy letting the user community port their toolbar to other browsers and systems, and has no plans to bring the Toolbar or Desktop Search to other platforms, much to the disappointment of users. Google may fail to realize that the tech elite, which use Macs, Linux, and Firefox at far higher levels than the general internet populace, tend to control much of the discussion when it comes to these sort of things, and locking them out may prove a bad more. Either way, A9 scores some points with the geeks.
(via Search Engine Watch Blog)

Postscript: The A9 Firefox toolbar is for version 1.0, which hasn't officially launched yet, as far as I know. Necessary, of course. But is this a smart idea, given that the official release will likely break the toolbar in a few weeks?

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 11/01/2004 12:55:00 PM