Google announced on Thursday that the Google toolbar will not be supported on Firefox 5 and all newer Mozilla browsers.

The decision to cut support follows improvements in browsing technology from Firefox's end, which already has all of the capabilities already established that the Google toolbar offers.

According to Google's blog, many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already built right into the browser. As a result, users will not have access to the Google toolbar while using Mozilla Firefox 5 or newer versions.

Google has noted that Firefox 5 and higher users can still download Google add-ones to their browsers. Features like AutoFill, page translation, page sharing, site thumbnails on a new tab, bookmarks and Gmail notifications can be added though the Mozilla add-ons website. Other Google toolbar features like find in page and spell-check are pre-built into Firefox 5.

Firefox 4 and under will still be supported by the Google toolbar.

There has been no indication that Google will cut off access to the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer, which was recently updated in June.

Google Software