AOL Beta Round-Up: A Sneak Peak at AOL Software Currently in Development More Power Browsing Features; The Right Toolbar for the Job? Wayne Kawamoto
Another "power browsing" feature in AOL Explorer is the unique display of thumbnail images for each open Web page as you pass the mouse cursor over its associated tab. While this is a creative and innovative feature, the thumbnails are generally too small to provide much in the way of useful information. In use, thumbnails mostly provide a rough picture of a Web site that can visually jog your memory.
AOL Explorer can also manage your computer files using AOL's new Desktop Search features. Here you may search for data, video, audio, pictures, and other files, and consider options such as date and file size to refine your searches. While useful, the Desktop Search feature — at least at this stage in the game — lacks many of the features and capabilities of competing tools from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
Besides excellent navigation, AOL Explorer offers decent security features. Built-in pop-up controls help to suppress annoying pop-up ads, and a scanning mechanism detects incoming spyware. While AOL users will clearly benefit the most from AOL Explorer, the program has its merits, particularly
with its convenient tabbed browser interface and modernized interface (especially compared to IE6).
Even if you're not an AOL user, an AOL toolbar can be useful. Beyond offering quick access to AOL services and features, the AOL Toolbar also comes with useful features of its own that may encourage you to add it to Internet Explorer. It offers a collection of menu items that appear as a graphic bar within Explorer.
Like competing toolbars from Google and MSN, AOL Toolbar offers a convenient field for entering text and performing Web searches. Like the best toolbars, the AOL toolbar highlights your search text within its displayed results, even highlighting text in different colors when searching on multiple terms — one for each color. This is helpful when you're trying to interpret the context of a search "hit." The toolbar also offers search options to look for images, audio, video, shopping, news, and local information.
Like AOL Explorer, the toolbar can suppress pop-up ads. You can choose to allow all pop-ups to appear, block all pop-ups, or allow pop-ups from sites
that you designate. No surprise, the toolbar offers one-click access to AOL services and channels with default options to access AOL yellow pages, maps,
shopping, stock quotes, weather, white pages, travel, city guides, and more.
The toolbar also includes a useful "Clear Footprints" feature that allows you to selectively and efficiently erase Web browsing information such as your browsing history, stored cookies, browser cache, and blocked pop-up list. While you can perform many of the same tasks in Internet Explorer, AOL's feature is much easier to access and operate.
The AOL Toolbar is a useful one, but it does lack some features found in competing toolbars. For example, both the Google toolbar and MSN toolbar can remember and store personal information and automatically fill in Web forms. And compared with other popular toolbars, AOL Toolbar doesn't offer comprehensive customization features to change the size of buttons and fonts or rearrange the location of buttons and options.
In short, there are many choices out there, and AOL's toolbar is a decent entry that, while competitive, will mostly appeal to users of the company's services.
Check back next week when we continue our look at AOL's stable of software in development when we cover the new AOL Media Player (AMP) and the next generation of AOL Instant Messenger, AIM Triton.
