I personally don’t think that all toolbars are bad or can be classified as adware. Google Toolbar used to be one of the must have toolbar on my Firefox web browser but I’ve stopped using it since it only supports Internet Explorer now. However, most third party toolbars embedded into software installers are generally unwanted because they are enabled by default during the software installation and clicking the Next or Finish button blindly will silently install the toolbar. In my opinion, only if the toolbar cannot be fully uninstalled from the Programs and Features in Windows operating system should be considered as a rogueware. One example is the Babylon Toolbar where after uninstalling it will still leave some traces on your web browser and you have to manually access the browser’s settings to change the default home page and search engine. If there are some toolbars installed on your web browser and it doesn’t come with an uninstaller, you can use Toolbar Cleaner to forcefully remove them.
Toolbar Cleaner is a free software that is able to detect toolbars and BHOs (Browser Helper Object) installed on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and allows you to remove them with a single click. Make sure that the web browser is closed and not running before you start to remove the toolbars with this software. Other than that, it also comes with a basic startup item remover at the Windows Startup tab.
Toolbar Cleaner was last updated about 7 months ago and I get to know this by referring to the Last-Modified value in HTTP response header of the download link. Go to web-sniffer.net, enter the download link into HTTP(S)-URL box and click the Submit button.
Although Toolbar Cleaner doesn’t seemed to be in active development, but it managed to detect SweetPacks, SweetIM and Babylon Toolbar together with a couple of BHOs such as Complitly and SweetPacks during testing. Checking all of them and clicking the Remove Selected Toolbar(s)/BHO(s) is able to successfully remove the toolbar but it doesn’t restore the default homepage and search engines that was modified by the toolbar installer.
The irony of Toolbar Cleaner is the setup installer comes with default options to install Anti-phishing Domain Advisor and setting MyStart as homepage in Internet Explorer. It is kind of weird that it helps to remove unwanted Toolbars and on the other hand it installs third party unwanted software. Toolbar Cleaner is actually portable and there is a trick to get the program without installing it. Simply use 7-Zip to extract the toolbarcleaner_setup.exe file and you can get the main program file ToolbarCleaner.exe at \$SHELL[17]\Toolbar Cleaner\ folder.
If you wonder why Toolbar Cleaner doesn’t support Safari and Opera, that is because these two web browsers are not vulnerable to automated installation of toolbars, plugins and BHOs.
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