Firefox wins again with extendability

I'm researching how to create custom toolbars for my 2 favourite browsers, and quickly discovering that making a custom toolbar for IE is going to be a royal pain in the ass involving buying some expensive but crappy-looking and badly documented 3rd party software and banging my head against GUIDs and classes and Windows registry shit, whereas I can make an extension for Firefox with nothing but Notepad and a little knowledge of XML, CSS and Javascript. Firefox wins again.

I expected there to be some relatively simple way to create an IE toolbar, maybe using Visual Studio? The people at Alexa, Google and Yahoo have all released IE toolbars - how were they created? Will I have to learn an entirely new programming paradigm to inject my own branded search tool into an IE browser? It's almost like the folks at Mozilla got together and decided "let's make sure Ian can make a browser extension by only employing programming paradigms that he already understands", while the Microsoft developers were saying "we wouldn't want the average webmaster to be able to make a custom toolbar, so let's make sure it's as difficult as we can make it".

It's not like I can refuse to do it - IE still has enough market share that a toolbar campaign would be impotent without an IE offering. Suffice to say that right now I would be amused and satisfied if IE "does a Netscape" though I can't see that day coming any time soon. $#@!!!!