Zmarties

Yahoo have released a toolbar for Firefox, as announced on their blog, which provides equivalent functionality to their IE standard toolbar (with the Anti-Spy feature of the enhanced toolbar also expected to be added soon).

There are various buttons that lead to the download - though I note that its obviously different code that provides the buttons on different pages - only on some pages does it check that you explicitly have Firefox which it works on, rather than Netscape or Mozilla which are not supported. The button leads to Yahoo's standard long EULA which if you bother to read it (and few if anyone does) shows how inappropriate it is to this software - it gives you the right to run the software in "object code form" - which can hardly apply since Mozilla based extensions are written in Javascript, and hence distributed in source code form.

The actual extension is signed - well done - this addresses one of the points in Peter Torr's essay "How can I trust Firefox", and will hopefully show other developers the way forward. Updates are planned to add Mozilla and Netscape support. The web pages claim the download is 0.4mb in size, but that's just because they have forgotten to update the text from the IE toolbar pages they are based on - the actual size is much less at 0.06mb.