Earlier this week, Facebook released an upgraded version of their toolbar for Firefox and IE users. Facebook initially launched their toolbar in 2006, however, back then it was only for english speaking users. The newly released toolbar now supports 16 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simpler versions), Danish, Dutch, German, Spanish (traditional and international versions), French, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, and Turkish.

Facebook toolbar allows users to set up pop notifications about incoming messages, pokes, friend requests, notes, wall posts, and status updates. In addition to this the search box within the toolbar acts in a similar way as the search box on the site itself. So you could go directly to a friends profile, by just typing his name.

The toolbar also allows for quick sharing of web pages, you’ll just need to hit the share button on the toolbar while being a page to share it with your friends on Facebook.

The Firefox version of the toolbar even lets you update your status from within the bar. The toolbar is a must see for serious Facebook users.

Another important update is that Facebook’s development team has released the source code for the Firefox and IE versions of the Facebook Toolbar. So if you are one of the developers and wants to play around with the toolbar and make your own modifications, you can fetch the source code of the toolbar from Facebook’s GitHub repository.

Although the toolbar is out there in the wild for more than 3 years now, it has failed to gain a sizeable audience. One reason for this being that Facebook has never made a serious attempt to promote its toolbar. To be honest, we cant blame them for this, with the type of growth that Facebook has experienced over the years, who needs a toolbar to bring back users more frequently.

No matter how useful it might be for some users, the toolbar is certainly one of the half hearted projects at Facebook – at least when it comes to marketing.