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Hotbar.com Bans Boring Browsers

Web site offers skins to add looks and extra functions to Internet Explorer.

By Douglas F. Gray, IDG News   

Skins are graphical overlays for applications that don't change the way an application performs, but the way it looks on the screen. Hotbar lets you customize your browser by adding any design you want to that plain-looking gray area surrounding the current URL on Explorer.

You can choose from the 700 skins now on the site, or design your own skins using the bitmap image format, says Oren Dobronsky, Hotbar's cofounder. Hotbar plans to have contests with prizes for the best-designed skins.

Visitors to the site can also send "e-card" skins. Instead of sending friends a holiday greeting card through e-mail, you can send a holiday skin for their browsers. That function currently works only with Internet Explorer, but Hotbar plans to launch all of its services for Netscape Communications' Navigator in two to three months, Dobronsky says.

More than Just a Pretty Face

When you install a Hotbar skin, it drops a row of four custom buttons below the location bar. The buttons include one that lets you change skins and access other pages on the Hotbar site, another that links you to the top ten sites in various categories, an e-cards button, and a services button. More buttons are planned for the future.

The Top Ten button is a "portable portal," Dobronsky says. It contains 2500 different links, divided into 250 Top Ten lists.

"The lists are regularly updated," Dobronsky says. "If a site becomes better, the list is changed." The list can also be customized to specific regions, he adds.

The services button has two features. A "fun" button randomly selects a skin for the browser and sends the user to a random Web site. A translation button uses technology from AltaVista to translate a Web page into any of 25 languages.

The company is developing a "guide button" that will update your content whenever you click on the button. Instead of having to visit a sports site to find the latest scores, you can simply click a button on your browser to view them.

NeoPlanet introduced in August a similar service, which also adds skins and search channels to your browser, as well as instant messaging and clubs. At the time of its release, NeoPlanet 5.0 offered 245 free downloadable skins from its Web site, most of which were created by customers.

(Liane Gouthro of PC World contributed to this report).