Salesforce AppBar vs. Firefox Plugin

I’ve been using the Salesforce Firefox Plugin for more than a year now and its been absolutely fantastic. I was just browsing some applications on the exchange and noticed a listing for The AppBar, which is a browser toolbar specifically for Salesforce.com. I’m not normally a fan of browser toolbars simply because of the amount of space they take up, but I think this one might really be a winner for Salesforce users.

The Firefox Plugin is really simple – once installed it adds a searchbox inside your browser and lets you perform an advanced search across any object in your organization. It actually works better than the default search on the homepage since it uses the “advanced” search, not a standard search.

The new Appbar developed by 3 Salesforce employees (although it doesn’t see to be an official Salesfoce app) goes way beyond the simple search functionality and creates a bunch of shortcuts into your application. When you complete a search you can choose from several options, even searching the appexchange. One of the big time savers should be the ability to directly link to add accounts, contacts, tasks, etc. The next big time saver are the views buttons. Each of these buttons lets you instantly link to any of your pre-formatted views, saving at least a few clicks each time.

I’m definitely going to try this out a bit longer to see if I hit any snags, but so far the only drawback seems to be the real estate I lose at the top of my browser.

I highly recommend trying out both of these if you haven’t already. If you’re stuck using IE as your only choice of browser, well then I really feel sorry for you….