Microsoft Ribbon-izes The MSN Toolbar

Microsoft's new MSN toolbar is almost reminiscent of the Windows 7 ribbon interface. Instead of a large, round button in the left corner, there's a large, round button that takes a user to a new tab in IE 7 with MSN as the default home page.

The MSN toolbar is sleek, has a nice look and some neat features, such as the "Flip" button, but overall it's rather ho-hum.

On the homepage for the MSN toolbar download, the Web site explicitly displays the logos for both Internet Explorer and Firefox with the caption, "Works On Both."

Well, it didn't for us at first. Firefox 3.5 crashed three times, stabilizing on the fourth try of re-opening it with the toolbar installed.

Of course, the search field on the toolbar does a search using Bing.

With the MSN toolbar, a user can quickly access Windows Live Services such as Hotmail, Spaces and Photo Gallery. There's a "Flip" button; clicking on it switches the toolbar between Windows Live Services access and MSN channels. It seems as if you can only pin MSN channels to the toolbar. There's no option to pin RSS feeds or access to any other social networking sites or e-mail outside of Microsoft's.

Microsoft doesn't disappoint with the eye candy, though. The toolbar incorporates the Aero glass look. You can change the color scheme (there are actually lots of choices to do so). You can control the amount of "tint" applied to the color and apply a theme based on the time of year. For example, selecting the "Winter" theme places an image of falling snow and a little snowman on the toolbar.

The new MSN toolbar is a nice, handy addition if your Internet experience is pretty limited to Microsoft's world. For those used to a more customizable toolbar and one for which you can create or download custom skins, the MSN toolbar will probably be a bit boring.