Coping with toolbar overload
Posted on 06. Dec, 2008 by Mike Halsey in guides and how to's
Every so often you’ll install a piece of software that wants to install a toolbar. It could be from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google or it could be a website that wants to install one of a hundred shopping toolbars to “help you”. Very quickly your browser can suffer from toolbar overload where you end of up three or four of the things, not knowing how to get rid of them.
First of all though how do you get them in the first place? I’ve already mentioned that they can be installed with software. You should keep an eye on the options when installing new packages and see if they ask you to “install the xyz toolbar”. This option will usually already be ticked and, unless you really want it, you should untick it.
The other way is through ActiveX controls. I’ve been asked what they are. At its simplest they are plug-ins for your internet browser that are distributed by websites. When a website wants to install an ActiveX control on your PC, you will see the yellow information bar at the top of your browser window asking you to do so.
I’ve spoken about these before in my series on internet security, but before installing an ActiveX control you should ask yourself “Can I not do something on this website that I want to?“ Maybe there’s a video that won’t play or an animation or game you can’t see. But if everyone on the page is working for you, there would be no reason to install this control.
So if you have these toolbars and controls installed, how do you turn them off and get rid of them? For the purposes of this article I’m only going to talk about Internet Explorer. The reason for this is that almost all of the people this article is aimed at will use it. The methods to turn off and remove toolbars and ActiveX controls from Firefox and other browsers though will be extremely similar.
Turning off a toolbar
This is easy. In Internet Explorer click on the Tools button in your main IE toolbar and select Toolbars from the menu that appears. Here you can see which toolbars are turned on and untick the ones you don’t want. Click the image below to view it full size.
Disabling controls and plug-ins
Sometimes it’s not enough to just disable a toolbar. Some of them, especially the more sales focused ones, can switch themselves back on and do unpleasant things like redirect your searches away from the search engine you really want to use. Again you will want to click on the Tools button in the main IE toolbar but this time you select Manage Add-ons.
This will bring up a new window (below) in which you can select the add-ons and plug-ins you don’t want.
You will see at the bottom of this window are options to Enable and Disable plug-ins and to Delete ActiveX controls.
The more plug-ins and controls you have running, the slower your web browser will be to load and use. Take opportunity to see what you have running. In the example above we could easily get rid of several plug-ins including the Google Toolbar Notifier, the two for the IE7 Pro toolbar and several others.
The ones I would suggest keeping in this example would be the Adove PDF Helper as this will assist in quickly loading and displaying PDF files, such as my own Power Users Guide. The other is the Shockwave Flash Object. This is used widely on the internet, including being the plug-in required to view videos on YouTube.
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