The other day I was looking for a different instant messaging application that could be used with the system we use at work. I came across Trillian Astra and decided to try it since it looked like it would connect to our network. Trillian has an attractive installer. But they’ve adopted what seems to be … Continue reading Free Toolbars – #13
The free toolbars that software vendors think they need to include with their applications are being presented in more sophisticated, devious styles. Toolbar installations also seem to want to change the default search provider in Internet Explorer. Vuze hides the toolbar remote in a “I accept the License terms” line. It isn’t clear from the … Continue reading Free Toolbars – #12
AVG has come out with a new free toolbar. I was surprised to note that when I installed AVG on the new Win-64 system that the toolbar was present in Internet Explorer any way. I thought, initially, that it was some quirk of the installer on a 64-bit system to ignore the flag. However, closer … Continue reading Free Toolbars – #11
IOBit in their latest update to SmartDefrag has, at least, started offering their own toolbar instead of someone else’s. That’s an improvement … sort of …
Today I had a need to run a batch resize of some scans made for work. IrFanView came highly recommended from places like LifeHacker.com. IrFanView did it make it really easy to run a batch resize of the scans. It just wanted to default to installing a pesky tool bar in explorer.
The latest version of Java attempts to install the Bing Toolbar for Internet Explorer. While it looks “cooler” than most, it is yet another toolbar that I don’t want or need. Obviously one of the things that I do is make screenshots of these various applications that want to install these superfluous toolbars. When Java … Continue reading Free Toolbars – #8
Another entry in the continuing series of identifying applications that want to install free Internet Explorer toolbars. There is an interesting pattern that is beginning to develop with Sun and Java updates. More about that in a later post.
An interesting free disk defragmenting program, SmartDefrag from IOBit, contains this free browser tool bar offer. It also helpfully offers to change my search engine.
WebRoot has changed their installation dialog a bit. The “we’re going to install the toolbar unless you say ‘no’” message now appears on the very first screen of the installation dialog. At least I don’t have to go looking for it; that is an improvement. Better still would be to assume that I don’t want … Continue reading Free Browser Toolbars – #5
Once again, another application, Winzip, wants to install a free toolbar for Internet Explorer. I’m probably dense, but I don’t get what the attraction behind loading down Internet Explorer with all of these “free” toolbars is all about. This is particularly true when it is an application that I would otherwise pay for, like … Continue reading Free Browser Toolbars – #4