Internet toolbars - a big hassle or a plus?

Internet toolbars are a very hot topic. Some hate them, some find them necessary.
I've never been big on them and I've always thought they can be the most annoying issues in your browsing experience. Internet toolbars can either be downloaded and installed by choice or they can be silently installed along with other software.

You can find an impressive amount of free programs online but they often come with additional junk software included in the installation procedure which gets silently and automatically installed at the same time if you don't pay attention. Why is that? 

Nobody gives away anything for free and, if you don't have to pay for a license, the producer can anyway make money out of the traffic that gets artificially developed by this infamous software. What's more, as toolbars are used mainly for web search, they can track all your searches and your web activity. This can be a downside if you don't want companies to have this kind of personal information about you without your permission.

Toolbars are absolutely not recommended in a corporate environment, because they can alter the way your browser normally works interfering with web applications, and they can compromise network security.
I don't personally recommend them to home users either, because they can impact your browser functionality. Several toolbars change your homepage, your default search engine and cause your browser to slow down or to have problems viewing certain webpages. 

Some of them are hard to remove. One of the most annoying ones is AVG toolbar. In spite of coming along with a very well-known and respected antivirus program (though I’ve never been a big fan of AVG, personally), it radically changes your browser configuration. It replaces your default search engine with a very crappy one, it slows down your browser and installs a plugin that checks for potential malicious sites. The problem is that this way legitimate sites may end up being blocked, too. If you try and restore your default configuration from the browser preferences it seems to work at first, but in the end nothing really changes. The only way I could effectively get rid of it was to reset my browser to its default settings.

Fig. 2 (Click to enlarge)

Fig.1 (Click to enlarge)

  PREVENTION RULES

• Download a software, whereas possible, from the producer’s website. Don't use third-party websites such as Softonic because they include in your download unnecessary components claiming this will help your download be faster. Do not fall for it.
• When you download a program, look closely at the download page; sometimes the producers includes additional software that gets bundled with your setup file and that you’ll download along with it, if you don’t disable this option. For example, if you download Flash Player from Adobe website, you'll find an option asking you whether to add or not Photoshop Lightroom to your download (Fig. 1). If you only need Flash, you want to make sure to deselect this option.
• When you install new programs, look closely at the setup wizard. There are usually two options: standard (or default) installation and custom installation. Always choose the latter one. This allows you to control all the setup options and, what's more important, to choose whether to allow or deny the installation of additional software (i.e. junk software), you wouldn't be aware of by following the standard setup.

For example, if you install Java, you'll notice that the procedure installs Ask Toolbar and sets up Ask.com as your default search provider (Fig. 2). If you don't want this, you'll make sure to disable these two options. Sometimes you can forget to do it and absentmindedly click Next but you are anyway still in time to cancel the installation. If you have started installing a program following the default setup but you notice that weird software you didn’t want is being installed, cancel the setup and start it over selecting custom installation. Following this rules you should be able to block most junk software before it is gets to your computer. 

REMOVAL

If something went wrong, you can use specific software to remove an internet toolbar and, after removing it, you should also reset your browser to its defaults settings, in order to reverse any change it has been done.
You can use two programs for this purpose:

• Junkware Removal Tool. It's an executable file that checks your computer for infected files. It's very easy-to-use and pretty quick. It took four minutes to scan my whole system (Fig. 3).

• ADW Cleaner. This freeware modifies the windows Hosts file to block those websites well known as A source of junk software. Windows HOSTS file is a system file located in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc that can be used to access faster to certain websites. In fact every time you enter a URL in your web browser, Windows looks up first for the IP address of the site in HOSTS. This feature can be used both by malware to hijack your browser and to block certain malicious sites. In fact ADW Cleaner matches the malicious websites listed with 127.0.0.1, which is the local IP address of the computer (localhost). This way every attempt to access the restricted sites will be redirected to the local computer and will fail.

  

  Fig. 3 (Click to enlarge)

WRAP-UP

Internet toolbars are a very hot topic, as some can't help them while others hate them.

I'm not personally big on them but, if you really want or need them, make sure to download them from legitimate websites and that they do not come as a bundled software while installing another program, because you can risk to download malware to your computer.

If you hate them, the same rule applies: be cautious when you install software downloaded from the Internet and make sure you know what specific program is actually being installed.