"Toolbars" a HPC:Factor.com Rant ™

This post is dedicated to Chiark - he was my inspiration


WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO COME BUNDLED WITH A BLEEDING BROWSER TOOLBAR.

I DO NOT want your serarch bar, I do not want your desktop search, I don not want your page rankings, I do not want your recommended links, I do not want your popups, I do not want integration with application X. I do not want your spyware method of gaining advertising revenue and saleable user demographic statistics through covert and to me utterly pointless ActiveX controls that sit in RAM and randomly throw data back to anyone who cares to listen.

If I wanted MSN Toolbar I would go to www.msn.com and download it.
If I wanted Google [something] I would go to www.google.com and get it.
If I wanted to open up a back door into my PC I would remove my hardware firewall, open all my ports and dial-up.

I do not need to have it bloat up an installer download and be presented with a unambiguous and carefully masked option to disable it from the install.

Now Macromedia are doing it with Flash!
Get the Yahoo! toolbar free with flash 7.0.19
http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflash/

Am I supposed to be pleased? Am I supposed to thank them?

I know there's an option to not install it. But how long until there isn't?
I don't want the wrecthed things in the firefox install, I certainly don't in IE. IE7 will come bundled with MSN's one - just you watch. Than all you Googlesters wont be happy and will move to Firefox - Oh look, a google toolbar partially provided already!

Net Portals Stop trying to tell me how to browse the Internet, stop acting like pornographers and blatantly copying google's ideas in an attempt to gain you own round the clock exposure on peoples desktops.
Stop Acting Like illicit pornographers.

arghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Wont somebody please think of the Children! - Helen Lovejoy

Yup. That is pretty much the reason why I went to Linux, where you can use a vastly outdated web browser and just block the junk. What about the time when all sites were plain text - just the information you needed and looked for...the only way to get something was yourself. Ever since corporations learned that they could use the internet as an advertising tool, the use of it has vastly decreased. You can't even browse with a modem anymore! It takes too long just to load a page. Advertisers are going crazy, and all of this should be illegal. A great start would be to ban spyware in some user protection act. That would cut advertising by A LOT, and leave at least legit stuff. Whoever came up with advertising on the internet via very-hard-to-block ads should be shunned.

Heh,

I don't subscribe to the text browsing 'dream'. The web is a creative place, I like it like that. If you think people can't advertise and push hard messages in text. Well, you're off the ball there. Just look at Google’s very successful, simple, plain text ad banners. Or indeed a broadsheet.

Also the idea that moving to Linux to use an old browser amuses me. It sounds to me like one of those "Linux is better coz.. just coz!" plug lines you get of diehards (the same ones who use forum signature space to tell people to get firefox )

Now there is another pet irritation.
One of these days I'll make a forum sig image which cycles between:
Get IE
Get Opera
Get Mozilla
Get Firefox
Get Netscape
Get A LIFE!

I'm talking about the browser itself here though, not site content

And yes, I'd issue all these malevolent toolbar, search and Trojan writes with ASBO's, get them off the net - twisted little freaks.

hehehe ... period.

....SO?! Lol I like linux just cuz I can use it and that I can do what I want with it.

I got me one of those there tool bars in the shed works real good like...
I just hang all my tools up on it...so i can see what all i got...Yep

Edited by thcrw739 2005-02-17 7:37 AM

tehehe, nice one.

Similar sentiment to:

I like sophisticated software very much It always tells me that what I think I want to do is not what I really want to do. And all these nice features (when I find a new one I cannot even tell whether it is about a feature or a bug)! They have plenty of them, so I can be happy if I have so many alternatives - although I really (what I think that I want but very likely I wanted something else) want to use a single one which doesn't work properly. YEAH, peace brothers and sisters!

Lol C:Amie - I like the terms... I generally prefer the command line over the gui (if set up properly!), text stuff, you all get the idea. (Yes being able to modify the output of a program by modifying its simple text file is nice).

Now back on topic, I was astonished when I saw Acrobat Reader coming with a toolbar included - Yahoo I believe. Toolbars are popping up all over the place - maybe developers think it is the future or something. Well, that would be nice, other than the fact that the art of coding web sites would be ruined because of all those toolbars on the top of your window, and then the spyware that is included, that may work out well. But I don't ever see myself working that way. All you need is a search, and lots of open space to see the information in front of you. Desktop real estate is always important - you can't do your work without it.

(Well, except maybe for hpc's! )

I would hope that the general non-nerdy consumers will figure out to avoid this, but I have seen many-a-computer stuffed with toolbars...spyware ones if I may add myself. I guess another reason why I like Linux is because I have more control over these things.

Ah wall yes, your argument is true. There is one caveat mind.

As Linux rises from obscurity, the developers will become interested and start writing the toolbars for it. Just as viris proliferation will increase. The idea that Linux is better because you don't have viruses on it only holds true because of the dominance of Microsoft.
So I say don't count your chickens... for the time being though, it is nice to surf unafraid.

Like you I was very disheartened to see Y! bar in Acrobat 7. If 7 hadn't proven so much faster than 6.2, I would have stayed there.
At least Firefox had the sense to bundle plug-in protection, similar to MSIE 6 sp2's ActiveX protection. Was a crying shame that Microsoft didn't do it in IE4 though. Billions of £ $ € ¥ would have been saved in industry if they had.

I've been on FireFox since pre1.0 and I've never looked back. Strangely though, there was once, where a page actually loaded faster on IE than FF.

But so far I like FF. Simple, light and fast (mostly). Except for that few pages that code specifically for IE, I can live (very comfy) with FF. No sillly toolbars that just appear and never go away like a bad date! hahhaa .... *yikes*

Was the page written specifically for IE?

hmmm ... not sure ... it was www.msn.com ... ... hahahaha

Oh yes, just fantastic. Give me the toolbar, umm yes please!


More: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050310.html