Except the new MSN homepage every MSN entities like MSN search and MSN toolbar have taken up the Bing brand name. If my memory serves me well, I never recall anytime MSN toolbar is available to a competing browser such as Firefox. Today the page on DiscoverBing.com here gives me a surprise and showing Bing Bar for Firefox and IE. Time has change and if Bing wants to compete and win on search, it has to make sure the other 35++% of browser market share out there have access to Bing’s technologies. Last time I read about 65% of Internet users use Internet Explorer.

So I decided to test it out. I have to install Firefox on my Windows 7. Then download the installer from the Discover Bing webpage.

Just like most Microsoft’s installer, just a few clicks on Next button to set me on the way to have Bing Bar installed

Now what I do is to restart IE8, I can see the new Bing Bar is there and trying to update itself with contents

One of my favourite feature is to have Bing Bar check emails for me

Let’s see how’s the experience in Firefox now

Exactly the same wihtout the need of Firefox’s Bing Bar to download anything as per in IE just now, suspect it is actually the same toolbar with a wrapper/ container which allows it to load on both browsers. Let me try to customize the Bing Bar in Firefox.

Straight away I can see that changes reflected on IE. Nice!