This of course brings up questions about some of the site integration technologies that they developed. OpenSearch has already taken on a life of its own, and in fact the new A9 seems to be mostly an OpenSearch aggregator. But what of SiteInfo?

SiteInfo was a scheme for a website to provide a drop-down menu for site navigation. The menu could be hierarchical, and could make use of user-entered search phrases. The website owner would create an XML file, siteinfo.xml, and place it in the site root. The client software would then request this file to populate the WebMenu, which would appear somewhere in the browser.

It’s not clear how useful this is. In some ways, it’s like the navigation toolbars some browsers* will build from <link> elements in a page’s header. A nifty idea, but it largely duplicates navigation that’s already on the page. (That said, <link> elements provide useful clues for bots, prefetching, fast forward and other automated tasks.)

I’d set one up for the Alternative Browser Alliance a few months ago, since it was a small site and easy to build the file, but never got around to figuring out what I’d put in a menu for this site.

As far as I know, only the A9 toolbar and the A9 SiteInfo extension for Firefox will actually check for this file.** There doesn’t seem to be anything preventing other toolbars or browsers from making use of the data, it just doesn’t seem to have caught on.

So it looks like SiteInfo is down to one unmaintained extension for one browser. Its future looks bleak.

*Opera: View » Toolbars » Navigation Bar.
In SeaMonkey: View » Show/Hide » Site Navigation Bar.

**Possibly to avoid a repeat of the favicon.ico fiasco, the toolbar routed requests through a caching proxy to limit duplicate requests. Any privacy issues were outweighed by the fact that A9 already kept a record of your browsing history—and it was a selling point! The SiteInfo Extension makes requests directly.

After installing the A9 toolbar for testing, I decided I wanted to know just when they were contacting their server. I installed the Firefox versions of four toolbars and used netstat to see when they connected.

• A9 Toolbar: Constant connections to hosts at amazon.com and alexa.com, but only when the toolbar is visible.
• Google Toolbar: Opens initial connection to a Google-owned IP address. If PageRank display is enabled, or was earlier in the session, maintains continuous connections—even when the toolbar is hidden!
• Yahoo! Toolbar: Opens initial connections to a Yahoo server and to unknown.Level3.net (which, based on traceroute, appears to be on the way from here to Yahoo). Sometimes the latter remains open for a long time before closing. It does not appear to reconnect on its own.
• StumbleUpon: Only connects when you press its buttons.

Overall, these toolbars seem to behave in a privacy-friendly way. But it was disturbing that the Google toolbar keeps a connection open even when it’s hidden, and that disabling PageRank display doesn’t seem to stop the connections until you restart Firefox. (Maybe it does eventually, and I didn’t wait long enough.) If I’ve hidden the toolbar, I don’t need the functionality right then. There’s no reason to hold a network connection open until I re-show the toolbar.

If I only want to use these toolbars occasionally, I can just hide most of them through the View→Toolbars submenu. But to keep the Google Toolbar from phoning home, I have to either disable PageRank and restart Firefox, or disable the toolbar in the Extensions—and restart Firefox.