Craig Burton

Toolbars - a Layman's Review: "

My son downloaded the MSN toolbar the other day - just two days after I had got rid of a toolbar from another reputed Internet giant. There is the Yahoo toolbar and the Google toolbar and now almost every good site has a toolbar for free. Until now I did not find one toolbar very different from the others. Perhaps it’s my ignorance speaking loudly but I am positive many a computer and Internet laymen will agree with me.

While most toolbars offered searches on the internet, a few had some nice to have tools that helped turn US street addresses into links to online maps or offer a spell checker or online translator.

Some others offer the pop-up blockers to stop those annoying advertisement windows that open up from time to time - especially when we are desperately searching for something important.

Yahoo toolbar now advertises its toolbar with the words "Protect your PC with award-winning Anti-Spy technology".

Recently Cipher Trust Research announced the release of its first ever E-mail toolbar. The company web site says "Web surfers can already download browser plug-ins like the Netcraft toolbar or SiteAdviser, which evaluate the trustworthiness of the Web sites they

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I love, hate toolbars. So usefull and so exposed. Especially the Browser Helper Object (BHO) model in IE. Msft exposed, and is now stuck with the legacy, can't get rid of it. Doing away with BHOs would break as many things as it would protect.