Many freeware and even shareware softwares nowadays come with bundled programs that get installed automatically without much knowledge to the user. Most of the non-techie users will find themselves in trouble once these bundled programs are installed and get into the way of the work being done on the computer. One such hindrance is from the browser toolbars. Most software come bundled with toolbars which get installed on our installed browsers, the most popular being Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.
Toolbar Cleaner is a free utility which lets you remove almost all kinds of toolbars installed in your browsers. It can remove about 15000 toolbars now including the browser helper objects (BHOs). This can also be very helpful in removing the spyware and malware that get installed in the browsers as BHOs.
The only thing I don’t like about Toolbar Cleaner is that it doesn’t have a portable version. If it had a portable version, any IT administrator could take this useful software with him on the USB and use it on any system he wanted.
Let’s look at the installation process of Toolbar Cleaner. It’s very easy to install Toolbar Cleaner as the installation process is guided by an installation wizard. The only tedious thing is the last options before finishing the setup. Here’s the screenshot:
It gives the following options:
- Protect my system with Anti-phishing Domain Advisor
- Set MyStart as homepage
I don’t recommend the anti-phishing domain advisor and would stick to the built-in security built into Internet Explorer and Firefox. The second option would disturb your homepage so I would uncheck both of the options.
The User Interface (GUI) of Toolbar Cleaner is quick simple and self explanatory. It lists all the toolbars and BHOs installed in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome respectively. You can check the toolbars which you want to remove and then click on “Remove selected Toolbar(s)/BHO(s)”. That’s all you have to do. Toolbar Cleaner will remove the selected options safely from the browser.
Download Toolbar Cleaner
