How to remove toolbars?

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It seems that every useful application forces you to install a web browser toolbar now. I managed to not install the Google toolbar, but when I installed Yahoo Messenger it forced me to install Yahoo Toolbar, and it's poorly programmed and runs in Real mode instead of Protected mode in Internet Explorer which causes problems. I recently updated a spyware removal program and THAT forced me to install a toolbar as well! Now I find my cursor always migrating to the "Ask search bar" instead of the URL bar. AUUGGGHHHH! Is there ANY way to get rid of these frickin toolbars? A toolbar killing program? HELP!

just go to View --> Toolbars and uncheck all toolbars you don't want to see. or you could always disable the extension in Tools menu.

Usually when the install screen comes up you can uncheck the box to install a toolbar. Be careful with those antispyware - some are actually "rogue antispyware" and don't actually protect - they in fact are spyware. There was even one called iedefender that would keep popping up every minute or so saying you have spyware to try to get you to buy the program.

I would HOPE that when you buy the antispyware program shrinkwrapped in a box at the computer store that it's not malicious. I've used Webroot's products for several years, and never had a problem. And yeah, I remember the iedefender worm. Quite annoying. It's just that Webroot now has a joint venture with Ask.com, and they include a toolbar. I didn't notice that I could opt out of the toolbar until after I clicked OK. As for Yahoo, they do NOT let you opt out of the toolbar.

Well, yeah if you bought it in a store it's almost certainly ok. Could you uninstall and reinstall it maybe? And yeah, Ask.com is a terrible search engine. Remember when it was askjeeves and Bart Simpson one time typed in "why do you suck so much?" I tried that once and it was mostly porn sites!

I thought the original idea of askjeeves was pretty innovative, but its gone far downhill.

Ever try clusty.com? That's a very good one in my opinion, and it has no toolbars or even any sort of client side software. Someone who wants to keep away from toolbar installation might want to check it out.

start-> control panel -> add or remove programs

that usually will allow you to get rid of the offending toolbars. Although they have gotten a bit sneakier.

LOL about the "why do you suck" in ask.com. I remember in 2004 using Google to try to find info about Lustron homes and all I got was porn. Like, it couldn't get past the "lust" in the name. Google has since gotten much, much better and has worked hard to rid paid sites from coming up in searches like that.

Good luck.

Last edited by riverotter on 11 Jun 2009, 5:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I remember searching for "history of the internet" in Google and got sites full of history of homosexuality and history of lesbianism. Obviously somebody had been packing the results. In Google's early days that was a huge problem, site admins would abuse metatags, which was then a new feature, and pack the metatags full of every term they could think of. At one point, if one entered "hacking" (as in computer hacking) into Google, all you got was porn. There was a site called Rape Stories (ick) that was really aggressive about monopolizing categories, they had sites called such things as hacking.rapestories.com and all your results would be from them. It made finding anything in Google a pain.

After the dot.com collapse, Google was the only survivor, and Yahoo didn't really care about its search feature too much because they wanted to be an "internet portal", so finding anything online without running into porn spam was nearly impossible for a while. Google's algorithms still aren't that great, they will return 200 million results, and most will only be tangentially related if that. Microsoft has a new engine called Bing that is advertising itself as a more rational search engine. One of the ads said "You can't buy 2,353,711 pairs of shoes". So I thought, but that won't stop some women from trying! LOL!

I will try Appwiz and see if that gets rid of the bars. Yahoo may be difficult to dump.

Hehehehe! I always wondered what happened to the Jeeves character. The butlers' union must have complained.

get Firefox, forget about IE.

i just downloaded IE8 (an "upgrade" from IE6) on the desktop and it sucks. I hate it.

Not everyone is computer literate enough to use firefox. I'm certainly not.

^ Shizzle: you just install it and use it just like IE (but without all the crap).
What do you find difficult?

I've got half my office converted to Firefox (and several people using Chrome).
They're not computer people and they're not computer savvy ... more like luddites.

There is nothing difficult about Firefox.

Just go to....

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Click the big green "Download Firefox" button and then see how it goes.
During setup, there's an option to make it your default browser... if you're worried, deselect it.

You won't lose Internet Explorer ... instead you'll have two choices of browser.
Also, all your bookmarks and home page etc will be migrated.

Give it a go and then tell us all how it went. I'd be very surprised if you found any difficulty.

Not entirely true. Yahoo's Toolbar somehow managed to finagle its way into Firefox on my computer last week. It just suddenly asked me if I wanted to install the updates for it (which promptly resulted in its deletion).

I use, and love, Firefox, but I wouldn't call it faultless. There are, admittedly, malware exploits, etc, just like with every browser, I'm sure. I've had good luck with it!