How to remove browser toolbars

Toolbars are a plague; Every other software, especially free software asks the user if he wants to install a toolbar on his system. This is most of the time not that useful and clutters only the browser window. Some toolbars do not offer an uninstallation routine at all which means that it is problematic to remove them completely from your system.

The free software Toolbar Uninstaller scans your system and displays the installed toolbars if they are known by the software. It currently detects 53 Firefox toolbars and 3 Internet Explorer ones. This does not seem that much but the author is explicitly asking for help to be able to add more toolbars to the application.

This is done by submitting information about a new toolbar on the developers homepage. It will then be tested and included once a removal routine has been found. The software is currently available as a beta version and definitely something to look after in the future.

Update: Toolbar Uninstaller has not been updated since 2008 which is a strong indicator that it can't remove newer toolbars that have been released after the last program update.

There are however a couple of alternatives that you can make use of instead.

Individual Toolbars

If you want to remove individual toolbars, you can use the following guides that assist you with the removal:

• Ask Toolbar Removal - This tutorial provides you with the means to uninstall the Ask Toolbar manually or using software. Make sure you check out the update at the bottom of the guide as it links directly to an uninstaller that Ask has created. This program seems to work best.
• Uninstall the Babylon Toolbar - The guide walks you through the manual uninstallation of the Babylon Toolbar on your system.
• AVG Security Toolbar - The article explains how you can remove the AVG Security Toolbar from the operating system.

Generic programs

If you have multiple toolbars installed, you may prefer a program like Toolbar Cleaner which removes any ties that toolbars have with web browsers that are used on the system. While it does not uninstall the toolbars, it makes sure that they are no longer linked to any browsers.

An alternative to that is Avast's Browser Cleanup Tool which can remove the majority of toolbars as well.

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