Bing Bar

While toolbars are generally not a very well acclaimed type of software, it is nonsense to neglect them completely. Even though they waste a browser’s space and consume resources, they also provide quick access to many useful functions.

Bing Bar, a browser toolbar from Microsoft combines lightweight behavior with decent functionality. Providing easy access to Bing search, instant messaging, maps and weather, Bing Bar’s customizable panel looks natural and doesn’t disfigure your browser beyond recognition.

A thin panel displays the search bar with the auto-suggest function and the buttons for Bing news, maps, e-mail, and Facebook accounts. Unlike other browser toolbars, Bing Bar uses a more convenient approach – every button works much like a tab that, instead of loading the content in a separate web page, opens it in a dropdown “wing” as Microsoft calls it. This lets you stay with the page you are reading now, instead of forcing you to see something the toolbar opens.

The most useful feature of the toolbar is its Facebook wing. This button is extremely functional, even in comparison with competing toolbars. Providing the Facebook timeline, notifications, and messages, it also lets you comment other people’s posts, change status messages, and, of course, like or dislike certain pages. The weather widget is wonderfully informative too.

The e-mail button allows you to tie Yahoo, Bing, and Gmail mail accounts to the toolbar, to momentarily check those mailboxes for new messages, and even to compose replies. Instant messaging through Facebook and Skype is also easily available as one of Bing Bar’s buttons.

Brilliantly functional, Bing Bar lacks a few capabilities compared to Google and Yahoo offerings, but more importantly it only supports Internet Explorer, carelessly ignoring all other major browsers. However if you stick with IE 7 or higher, Bing Bar, the least cluttered of all available browser add-on solutions, can be definitely recommended for installation.