As I mentioned in Top Three Usability Problems, the Firefox 1.x toolbar plugin has been very popular, and I really wanted to add one for Internet Explorer too. Luckily, IE7 now supports the OpenSearch standard for search plugins, and so does Firefox 2.0. I had to write an XML description of SearchMash, then I was just able to add a couple of javascript calls and a link in the head, and SearchMash now shows up in IE’s toolbar when you click on the link in the preview frame.

It even shows up temporarily in the list if you visit http://mashproxy.com/search, thanks to some autodiscovery magic.

Out of the three usability improvements I wanted to make, that was the easiest. Getting the history working, and quicker load times are going to be harder. Work is very busy right now, and this is my ‘relax after a long day’ project, so I’ll see how much progress I make.