In the early 2000s, Internet Explorer had one genuinely useful interface feature that Firefox did not: hover your mouse over any image on a webpage, and a small toolbar would appear near the top-left corner of the image, offering quick buttons to save it, print it, email it, or open it in My Pictures. For users accustomed to IE who had switched to Firefox, this was a noticeable absence. ImageToolbar was the Firefox extension that filled the gap.

Built by Palancar (palancar.net) and active throughout the Firefox 1.x through 3.x era, ImageToolbar was a faithful recreation of IE’s image toolbar behavior in Firefox’s extension framework. It was one of several Palancar extensions designed to smooth the transition for IE defectors — users who wanted Firefox’s security and performance advantages without losing the IE UI behaviors they relied on.

What ImageToolbar Was

ImageToolbar displayed a semi-transparent overlay toolbar when you hovered your mouse cursor over any image on a webpage. The toolbar offered a small set of actions:

  • Save image — download the image file to your local computer
  • Print image — send the image directly to the printer
  • Email image — open a mail compose window with the image attached (using your default mail client)
  • Open My Pictures (or equivalent folder) — open the system’s designated image folder

These actions weren’t new capabilities — Firefox could do all of them through the right-click context menu. What ImageToolbar added was immediacy: the actions appeared proactively when you paused over an image, without requiring a right-click, without reading a context menu. For users who frequently saved images from the web, it reduced the interaction cost.

The extension was active on addons.mozilla.org for most of the 2000s, receiving mentions in Firefox migration guides and “Firefox tips” articles on technology sites including CNET. The palancar.net extension page accumulated backlinks from Firefox resource directories and user community pages on Slashdot-era discussion forums.

How It Worked Technically

ImageToolbar used Firefox’s XUL system to inject a floating overlay panel into page content, positioned relative to any <img> element the user hovered over.

The core interaction model:

  1. A mouseover event listener (injected via XUL content script) detected when the cursor entered an image element
  2. On hover, the extension calculated the image’s position on the page and displayed a lightweight XUL panel — a transparent toolbar — near the image’s upper-left corner
  3. The panel contained XUL button elements, each wired to a Firefox command: Browser:SavePage, direct printing via nsIPrintingPromptService, and the mailto handler for email

The hover detection required debouncing — images are frequently encountered during normal page scrolling, and triggering a toolbar on every mouseover event would have been visually chaotic. ImageToolbar used a short delay (typically 500ms) before displaying the overlay, matching IE’s behavior.

Positioning the overlay correctly required knowing the element’s coordinates in the viewport, which Firefox’s XUL environment provided via getBoundingClientRect() combined with the browser’s scroll position APIs.

The extension also had to handle edge cases: images that were partially off-screen, images that were links (where the toolbar needed to not interfere with click navigation), and animated GIFs where the displayed dimensions didn’t match the intrinsic image size.

Technical documentation from this era is archived at web.archive.org, which captures the XUL overlay development tutorials that extension authors like Palancar would have relied on.

Why the IE Image Toolbar Disappeared

Before discussing what happened to ImageToolbar specifically, it’s worth noting that the feature it was replicating also disappeared from Internet Explorer. Microsoft removed the image toolbar from IE 7 (2006), quietly acknowledging that hover-activated UI overlaid on page content created more problems than it solved.

The issues:

Layout interference. Hovering an image in a tightly-packed layout often positioned the toolbar over adjacent elements, obscuring text or triggering unintended interactions. On image-dense pages — photo galleries, product grids, search results — the toolbar was more disruptive than helpful.

Right-click redundancy. Every action the toolbar offered was already available via right-click. As users became more sophisticated, the toolbar’s immediacy advantage diminished. Saving an image with right-click → “Save Image As” became entirely second-nature.

Touch incompatibility. As the web moved toward touch devices (starting around 2007 with the iPhone), hover-based UI became architecturally problematic. Touch surfaces have no hover state.

Why ImageToolbar Was Discontinued

For ImageToolbar specifically, the same forces that ended other XUL-era extensions applied. Firefox Quantum (version 57, November 2017) dropped XUL/XPCOM support entirely. Extensions not migrated to WebExtensions stopped working on that date.

The case for migrating ImageToolbar was particularly weak: the feature it provided had already been removed from IE (the system it was replicating), right-click menus had become the accepted interaction pattern for image actions, and Firefox’s own native right-click menu had become more complete over the years. There was no compelling reason to rewrite the extension for a new API.

Additionally, modern browsers had simplified image saving considerably. Drag-and-drop to a download manager or desktop folder, right-click save, and browser download panels all provided fast image acquisition without requiring a specialized extension.

What Replaced It

For the specific use case ImageToolbar addressed — quick image saving and printing — modern browsers handle this natively:

Right-click context menu. Every current browser (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari) includes “Save Image As,” “Copy Image,” and “Open Image in New Tab” in the right-click context menu for images. Firefox specifically includes “Copy Image Link,” “View Image Info,” and “Send Image” (to configured mail client) in the extended menu.

Firefox’s built-in image actions. The Firefox Picture-in-Picture feature and image-specific menu items in current Firefox versions cover most of what ImageToolbar provided.

Browser extensions for image downloading. If you need more than the native menu, addons.mozilla.org has current WebExtension alternatives:

  • Image Downloader — batch image downloading from pages
  • DownThemAll — the venerable download manager that handles images among other resources

For print specifically. Firefox’s print dialog (Ctrl+P or Cmd+P) includes a “Print Selection” option when content is selected, and right-clicking any image provides a direct print path via “Print Image” in some configurations.

If You’re Building Something Similar Today

A modern WebExtension approach to hover-triggered image actions would use a content script that adds DOM event listeners and injects UI elements:

// content.js
let toolbar = null;

document.addEventListener('mouseover', (e) => {
  if (e.target.tagName === 'IMG' && e.target.naturalWidth > 50) {
    showToolbar(e.target);
  }
});

document.addEventListener('mouseout', (e) => {
  if (e.target.tagName === 'IMG') {
    hideToolbar();
  }
});

function showToolbar(img) {
  const rect = img.getBoundingClientRect();
  // Create and position toolbar UI
  // Use browser.downloads.download() for save action
}

The browser.downloads API handles the save action. Printing is more complex in WebExtensions — there’s no direct print image API, so current extensions typically open the image in a new tab and trigger window.print().

One important consideration for hover UI in WebExtensions: the shadow DOM or isolated styling via CSS all: initial is recommended to prevent the toolbar from being styled by page CSS, which was a common complaint with XUL-era overlay tools.

An IE Feature Worth Remembering

ImageToolbar is worth remembering not because it was a great extension design — hovering to reveal UI is generally acknowledged as poor UX today — but because it represents an interesting moment in browser history. Firefox’s competitive advantage in 2004 was extensibility: you could give Firefox any feature IE had. ImageToolbar was a literal demonstration of that, replicating an IE-specific UI in a competing browser.

The original palancar.net download page is preserved at web.archive.org.