Toolbars...

It seems as if everyone today wants to install a toolbar in your browser. Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ASK and Live, just to name a few. The few I just mentioned work well and offer benefits like pop-up blocking and spyware searching. Then there are the ones that I consider BAD! MySearch, WildTangent, Alexa to name a few. These toolbars act as a form of spyware sending info back to their makers about what you are doing, even worse some of them can actually act as servers to distribute themselves. I am not going to discuss the pros and cons of toolbars as there are several sites on the web that do a better job of that (search on toolbars).

What I am going to discuss is why would my local pizza joint would ever have a toolbar? In case you haven't noticed you only have so much screen real estate. Adding a toolbar to take up ~ 25 pixels will reduce that window even more. Now let's see... Many systems I have seen have had Google, Yahoo, MSN, and maybe another bar loaded...that is ~75 pixels. If your screen resolution is set to 1024/768 then you only have 768 vertical pixels to view. take away the window header, menu, buttons, tabs and status bars you only have around ~625 pixels. Now subtract the 75 from the toolbars that are usually never used = 550 pixels! That is a pretty small window to see the world. So I do not think there could be much benifit of having a toolbar other than giving me a free pizza every once in a while...

My advise, use one. Pick the toolbar that will provide the functionallity that you want to use. If use Internet Explorer as your preferred bowser then check out: Advanced Searchbar

If you should have more than one installed you can try going to START-> CONTROL PANEL -> ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS and try to uninstall them. If that does not work then in Internet Explorer7 (Internet Explorer6 go to VIEW->TOOLBARS), go to TOOLS->TOOLBARS and uncheck the ones you do not want to show.

In a future post I will discuss browsers and the benefits and drawbacks....