Blindsided by Google’s Sidebar

By | September 19, 2005

I’ve had the Google Sidebar aboard for nearly a month now and, sadly, I’m not impressed. I had hoped early teething problems would somehow fix themselves, but they haven’t. These are the problems I’ve encountered (some of which may be down to my own ineptitude, or conflicts I grant you):

  • unable to access Gmail account in Email Plug-in (password not recognised). Others report a similar problem;
  • unable to access AdSense account in third party Adsense Status plug-in;
  • Unable to ‘train’ News Plug-in so it gives me news I can use. I’ve been telling it what I don’t like by clicking on the ‘Don’t show me items like this’ for weeks now and it still gives me news even my broad interests don’t embrace;
  • The otherwise neat Todo Plug-in occasionally won’t allow me to add items — the box appears but won’t accept text.

I know we shouldn’t look gift horses in the mouth but this is one of the biggest (in terms of features and file size) pieces of software Google has shipped to consumers and it doesn’t bode well that it works so poorly. I think that, for what it was, the Desktop Sidebar was better. I also heard that Serence is planning a sidebar version of Klips that doesn’t take up as much space as the Google version. Watch this space.

3 thoughts on “Blindsided by Google’s Sidebar

  1. suresh kumar

    if your having problems with logging onto Gmail.. i would delete your cache and then try again..

    i doubt its related to the toolbar..

    btw — you need to try the spell checker..

    Reply
  2. suresh kumar

    sorry my mistake… i realised that you were talkng about the deskbar and now the toolbar!

    i noticed an updated version of the sidebar… compared to the original version that they had… it seemed to resolve many of the problems that you were referring to…

    btw — i love webclips..

    Reply
  3. Google Sidebar

    I had been using it for a while. The sidebar (well, google desktop in general) can really use up a lot of processing power! The trouble I have now it that it is not compatible with a piece of software I have on my computer, so the sidebar won’t load up.

    Reply

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