Our New Browser Extension

By jherskowitz | February 15, 2010

The “T” Word

In the past, the word “toolbar” has often had a stigma associated with it that evoked visions of undesired third-party adware bundled and installed without a user’s consent.  In fact, at LimeWire we have turned away countless companies that have wanted us to bundle software - that while it would have generated revenue for us, provided limited value to you.  We have turned down those offers because we firmly believe in making sure anything we offer to our users provides value - specifically value on top of your core LimeWire experience.

We believe that we have created a new toolbar that does specifically that… it provides core value to your file-sharing/searching/downloading experience.

Do we generate some revenue from you guys using it to search the web?  Yes.

Does that make it evil?  No, we think it is far from evil.  In fact, we think it is pretty damn cool and we hope you do to.

What Does it Do?

Our goal was to try to bring your LimeWire experience more aligned with your day-to-day web activities.   To accomplish that we focused on just a couple of core features.

1.  Search

• Search the Web  - this does exactly what you’d expect from a search box.  Searches Ask.com and returns a list of results.
• Search LimeWire - when you enter a keyword, select the “LimeWire” option and then hit “search” the toolbar launches LimeWire, passes the keyword and executes search in LimeWire
• Search Torrents - this also leverages Ask.com to search for torrents that match your keyword

2. Magnetize

• “Magnetize” is a feature that we first launched as a bookmarklet (http://www.limewire.com/workshop), but we have now made a permanent fixture in our toolbar.  Basically, the toolbar searches the web page you are on to identify links to certain audio, video, image, document and torrent files and enables users to send those files’ locations (all files or just one) to your LimeWire application.  When you select individual file names from the drop-down menu (or “get all”), LimeWire is launched and automatically starts downloading the file(s).   No more repetitive right-click/”save as” actions.  In fact, if they are audio files, LimeWire automatically adds them to your iTunes library.

What Will it Do in the Future? 

While we think what it does today will make your lives easier, we are even more excited about some innovative features we will be adding to it in the coming weeks.  Keep your ears open for more (that was a really cheesy hint).

Where Can I Get It?

The toolbar is currently only available for Windows (XP, Vista, Win7) and works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  It is presented to you as an option within the LimeWire installer.  We hope that you will try it, and if you want to opt-in to tweaking your default search and homepage settings, feel free.

If you don’t want the toolbar, just deselect the checkbox and we won’t install or change any of your default browser settings.

We hope you enjoy it, and have a bunch of great new features in store for both the LimeWire application as well as the toolbar.  Stay tuned!