Toolbars

[DAZZD88]

We have a staff member's laptop here in our office at the moment because it's running slow. Having done a bit spring cleaning, my colleague has come across a multitude of toolbars installed. Why do companies insist on slowing down our web browsers by sneaking in toolbars? Advertising? Are they genuinely trying to improve your experience? It really gets my goat when you see that toolbars have been sneakily bundled in with software. End users often don't know any better, so my mini-rant isn't aimed at them. Some toolbars really slow things down or cause other issues like deleting the boot.ini file at startup (yes, I'm looking at you AskToolbar!!).

 

I personally feel that toolbars are crapware (some are even malware) and that they should not be allowed to be packaged with installers or at least be unchecked by default.

[sted]

shame you cant just bick install of anything with teh word toolbar in it

 

ive seen computers before where you wonder how they use a browser as almost all the screen is toolbars

[FN-GM]

I am careful with them one accident got put on an image a few months back. I images about 700 machines before noticing. A quick startup script got shut of it :-)

[CAM]

Toolbar bundling has been around for years and used to be considerably more prevalent then it is today. Each install of a toolbar gave the developer a bit of extra pocket money, especially when it came to freeware. The toolbar trade was a bit dodgy mind you and some installed themselves without authorisation or through deception, refused to uninstall and may even fill a machine with spyware and malware.

 

It became less popular when spyware hit the public spotlight and developers started dropping toolbars so they weren't associated with them. Browsers like Firefox also started including search boxes and pop-up blockers and most features that were in toolbars back in the day are now standard features on browsers making them useless.