This post series reflects my article “Developing a Browser Toolbar” published in the ASPects in January 2010 (Volume 23, Issue 1), a magazine of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP).

Beside commercial products I’m directly selling to customers, over the past few years I’ve also created many freeware products. This is not the right place for discussing the pros and cons of toolbars, but I decided that integrating a toolbar into the installers of my products would be a good way to earn some money with my freeware products.

Therefore I’ve worked together with a German advertisement company that provided me with a ready-to-use toolbar. Because there arose some significant problems with their toolbar some time ago, I decided to develop a toolbar on my own.

I will not be able to describe the steps for developing such a browser toolbar in detail or we’ll run out of pages here. If you also need to create a toolbar on your own in the future, I can give you some hints and links to good resources that makes this challenge far easier, and if you need help, ask in the ASP’s .technical newsgroup (or just add a comment below).

First of all, I had to define on which browser the toolbar should work. Of course, two browsers come into consideration immediately: Internet Explorer and Firefox. I’ve also taken a look at Opera and Chrome, but both browsers did not provide real add-on support and therefore I decided to concentrate on Internet Explorer and Firefox for the moment – the most prevalent browsers.

As I read up on this matter I found that Internet Explorer gives the developer a hard time also on this topic. Therefore let’s start with the easier one in the next post.

Contents of Post Series “Developing a Browser Toolbar”:

• Introduction
• Mozilla Firefox
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Installation System
• Summary

This post is also available in Deutsch.