What percentage of people download browser toolbars?
This isn’t true for all toolbars but I work on a lot of infected laptops at work and 90% of all browser tool bars I see there are malicious in some way. I worked on a system the other day tat had 7 toolbars! You could hardly see the web pages, it was ridiculous. Anyways, back to the point, toolbars come up in virus and malware scans all the time because some of them track your data and/or passwords or are just a mask for a virus. A lot of times the tool bar will have a very helpful sounding name, like Security Tool Bar 7.1 or innocent sounding names like Hotbar. Both of those toolbars are very nasty and cause nothing but grief (viruses, spyware, pop-up ads…) to those unlucky enough to download them. Some even prevent the browser from functioning, or at least functioning properly. Even if a toolbar isn’t malicious, it just takes up more space on the screen and takes up computer resources and affects your computer’s performance negatively. Did I mention I don’t like tool bars?
It really takes an effort to keep your browswer toolbar clean today. Google toolbar is bundled with so many things, including Sun Java, that you have to be computer savy to avoid it. By default, it will install when a ‘typical’ installation is done. You have to do a ‘custom’ installation to avoid it, and ‘custom’ installations scare most users. On the other hand, I’ve seen so many people install programs by blindly clicking ‘Next’ until they get a ‘Finish’ option that I don’t think the majority of the users know they even have a choice.
