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Old habits die hard: Yahoo introduces a brand-new browser toolbar

Old habits die hard: Yahoo introduces a brand-new browser toolbar

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Much hay has been made around Yahoo's reinvigoration under CEO Marissa Mayer — the company has released some very solid mobile apps, improved Flickr, and of course there's that big Tumblr purchase. However, today's news shows that old habits really do die hard: Yahoo has just announced a new update to its browser toolbar, a product that most people probably forgot about years ago. As expected, it offers quick links to Yahoo services like Mail, Flickr, weather, stocks, and news; it also lets you plug in social networks like Facebook and Tumblr, of course.

Since the heyday of toolbars (sometime back when IE 6 was a dominant force), Chrome, Firefox, IE 10, and Safari have all essentially replaced the functionality that these browser add-ons offered. With the advent of built-in, robust extensions and apps and every-present search capabilities, there's just very little reason to install a toolbar. Maybe those heavily invested in using Yahoo's email and other products will find it more useful than simply installing extensions for services you want to keep track on, but that's about the only use case we can really envision. If you're one of those who wants to revisit the mid-2000s browsing experience, you can get the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox, IE, and — for the first time — Chrome.