MSN Adding Tabbed Browsing to IE

MSN’s free desktop search tool, which enables users to search their local drives, networked drives, and e-mail, will add tabbed browsing to Internet Explorer (IE), making Microsoft’s browser more competitive with browsers such as Opera and Mozilla’s Firefox. MSN also announced plans for a version of the Search Toolbar for corporate use. The announcements suggest that MSN has ambitions beyond its traditional consumer audience, but these ambitions overlap with other Microsoft product groups and could create confusion for corporate IT departments.

Toolbar Improves Desktop, Web Search

Formally launched in May 2005, the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search is the successor to the MSN Toolbar Suite, which had been in a wide beta since Dec. 2004.

Like the earlier Suite, the Toolbar installs search panes and associated user interface elements in several places, including the Windows Taskbar, Windows Explorer, IE, and Outlook. From these panes, users can search the Web or search local and networked drives for e-mail messages, documents, and many other types of files. By default, each pane returns results of only appropriate types of data—for example, the Outlook toolbar is set to search only e-mail messages and attachments—but they can be configured to search other resources. All the search panes use the same data index and Internet search engine, and therefore return identical results for a particular resource.