Bing Bar

Bing Bar is an application that merges multiple multimedia services and social networks to bring them closer to you in the form of a browser toolbar.

It integrates into your Internet Explorer browser right after installation and is ready to provide you with quick access to news feeds, maps, weather forecasts, email services and social network websites. You also get an embedded search bar which you can use to find content on Bing.

Apart from those, you can use the toolbar to gain access to Facebook chat, radio stations, videos, games and Bing Trends. There aren’t all that many apps to choose from, yet they are some of the most commonly used.

The toolbar installs the mentioned services by default but you can customize its content by adding more apps or removing the ones you don’t use. Bing Bar can be set to notify you with audio alarms when a new article is posted in the news section, when you receive a like on Facebook or when a new email is delivered.

Accessing the news section you get articles from categories such as “World News,” “Politics,” “Business,” “Entertainment,” “Sports,” “Sci/Tech” and “Health.” All the articles are displayed in a window and allows you to easily browse through them.

The e-mail app enables you to choose from different mail services thus making the toolbar accessible for a wide range of users. In case you do not need to use it, or consider that it is eating up browsing space, you can choose to disable Bing Bar or simply hide it until you need it again.

To wrap it up, Bing Bar is a toolbar in the traditional way, which provides you with quality content and practical apps, without affecting the computer’s performance. It might slow down IE from time to time, yet the GUI is intuitive and the response time is good.