More Wood Behind Fewer Browsers: Google Kills Toolbar for Firefox

Google’s recent project purge has claimed another victim.

As part of its new “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach to business, the company is discontinuing its Google Toolbar for Firefox, a browser add-on that provided direct access to an array of Google services. The company said Thursday that it will not support Google Toolbar beyond Firefox 4. Which means the Firefox 5 folks who had been eagerly awaiting its release are out of luck.

Why end support now? Google argues that many of the features provided by its Toolbar are now already built right into the browser. That’s true, to an extent — but not entirely, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan observes.

“The argument that many features of the Google Toolbar are built into the browser doesn’t wash,” he explains. “Firefox doesn’t offer a native way to perform site-specific search, not to view cached pages, nor to perform specific vertical searches on Google, not to get PageRank data. Firefox also doesn’t feed back into Google Web History. Only the Google Toolbar does that, which means Google has now permanently broken a part of personalized search for Firefox users going forward.”

Makes you wonder if this is not just part of the broader Google project housecleaning we’re seeing, but a move to further promote the company’s own Chrome browser…