Yahoo! has finally released a beta of their official toolbar for Firefox. I can't check it out now, so I'll update this post later with more information.

Update 2005-02-10: Okay, I've tested it out, and although it does offer a lot of features and there was obviously a lot of work put into it, the final result is rather poor. Particularly, it's hard to use and customize. Yahoo! has created a toolbar customization interface on their website, and there's really no reason to do that. The customization features should be built inside the extension itself. The A9 toolbar is a great example of what I'm talking about. It's great that Yahoo! is supporting Firefox with a free feature-packed toolbar, but seriously, they could have put a little thought into usability. Luckily the toolbar is still in beta, so the final result may be more user-friendly than this. At least I hope so.

Meanwhile, Google still hasn't released a Firefox toolbar (although they will certainly release several Firefox tools in the near future), and MSN also doesn't have any Firefox tools. Since they're Microsoft, it's extremely unlikely that they'll support a competing browser anytime soon. That's Microsoft for you.