Along with the limited beta release of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista came a beta version of IE7 (Internet Explorer 7).
Almost immediately, Vista and IE7 users began reporting that their Yahoo! and Google toolbars had..vanished, while other less, um, competitive toolbars (pop-up blockers and form-fillers, to name two) experienced no such mystical disappearance.
But hey, that’s why they call it “beta”, points out Molly Holzschlag.
Perhaps more directly, Microsoft’s technology evangelist and “Chief Blogger”, writes on his Scobleizer blog that “There’s a report, on the Register, that IE 7 doesn’t work with the Google or Yahoo toolbars. I just talked with Dean Hachamovitch, the guy who runs the IE team, and he says that they tested with the Google and Yahoo toolbar and it was running on their machines (he just sent me screen captures of his personal machine running IE 7 with both the Google and Yahoo toolbar installed) and they in no way are trying to block the Google toolbar from working. He says that he commits to everyone to getting the toolbar to work and if there’s something that isn’t working the IE team wants to know about it so they can fix it.”
So, the bottom line, Microsoft seems to be saying is, if your toolbars disappear, it’s just coincidence, and they are working on it.
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In the meantime, it has also been pointed out that you can use the preferences settings in IE7 to make either Google or Yahoo! your default search engine (IE7’s default search engine is MSN, but you can hardly blame a company for pushing their own stuff).
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I don’t have Vista — in fact, when I do buy a new laptop, hopefully later this year, I’m seriously considering having XP Media Center installed over whatever version of Vista that Microsoft and the manufacturer had decided to try to push on me. But I do recall that when I tried IE7, besides the fact that it made my computer glacially slow, it ditched my Google toolbar, and I was quite unhappy about that. Enough so that I wound up retreating to version 6. (Netscape wouldn’t allow it either but at least I could do a Google search through the browser.)