Ask HN: When will the toolbar madness end? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When will the toolbar madness end?

12 pointsd_r14 comments

I just logged in to Amazon to purchase an item. This is a company I highly respect as an engineer.

What greeted me was a series of prompts for "Your Amazon Browser: Internet Explorer 8 Optimized for Amazon.com"

Clicking in, there was an ad copy that mentioned a custom toolbar that makes shopping easier, and a disclaimer that the toolbar features Alexa and will collect your browsing information. Having Amazon peddle this made me feel cheated.

I use Google Chrome and couldn't be happier. But I feel incredibly bad for the average computer user with Internet Explorer (unpatched) with 10 toolbars for Yahoo Search, Bing, Amazon, et cetera.

It's the direct opposite of the Apple App Store experience. Any company can make a quick buck by spreading their toolbar. Microsoft doesn't curate the browser plugins in any way. A typical user is not savvy and installs everything "free." This results in a terrible computing experience.

I'm not even mentioning spyware -- only the "legitimate" browser plugins such as Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc. Some friends have every single one installed.

This is a problem that bothers me as a hacker. What can be done? Some thoughts:

- Promoting platforms instead of toolbars (e.g. Chrome plugins). More useful features (like Rapportive) instead of yet another search box.

- Browsers that implicitly force good UI (e.g. allowing no more than 1 toolbar to be installed)

- Curating plugins, App Store-style.

Why do companies produce these toolbars? I can think of two reasons:

1. as an enticement to install something they want on the client (e.g. spyware)

2. as a way to place their services closer to the user to make them more likely to be used (e.g. search)

So, to respond to your ideas:

- Useful, thoughtful plugins serve a completely different purpose

- Unnecessarily restrictive

- The problem isn't users going out and installing stupid toolbars, it's companies bundling them with other products.

I would propose this instead: since toolbar-pushers are relying on the toolbar being trivial to install and annoying to remove, the browser should just make it trivial to remove as well (a mandatory "x" on the right side that uninstalls the toolbar).

Agree.

Toolbars often change your default search engine for "Google search" affiliates, your homepage and redirects typos to money sites.

That's for sure a good business.

Another reason is to collect data on the webpages you visit for data mining and improving web search. The more data a search company has, the better it can rank results and personalize ads.

See these papers from Microsoft and Yahoo: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.161... http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1557019.1557135 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1835449.1835548

The goal of my current startup is: finally a toolbar you actually want to use. I'm eliminating the need for installation, the toolbar only comes up when you tell it to, it's customizable, and it's actually quite useful. You pick the things you want; google, amazon, urbandictionary, whatever.

I realize this post is little else than self promotion, but I've been working 60 hrs a week on it and rather enjoy hearing that people are still suffering from toolbar hell. Beta in 2 weeks.

Pretty far off topic, but: How on earth can you eliminate the need for installation? Do browsers have some new ability these days to automatically run remote code?

Your question is spot on.

Bookmarklets.

<sarcasm> Maybe those users still have 4:3 monitors and want to make it feel more like a widescreen without spending more money.

Make a toolbar and call it the "Toolbar Curator Pro 2011“ so the user can hide/disable other toolbars easily (Hey, most of them don't know that you can open "Internet Options", go to the "Programs" tab and click on "Manage add-ons".) Then, market it by saying how it's free and it even comes with Alta Vista search function. I bet most of those users don't have Alta Vista as a search provider in IE8 and it would sound so new and hip to them. </sarcasm>

Seriously though, I think sz's suggestion is not bad.

I believe that toolbars are just one facet of the bigger problem. Toolbars clutter the UI, but there are also BHOs that are invisible and waste memory and processor, not to mention their inherent spy-like nature. They are even more evil than toolbars. I think Microsoft should drop the name "Browser Helper Object". To me, the name "BHO" is unnecessarily long and complicated, yet it doesn't convey a lot more meaning than "plug-in" or "add-on" (to the non-geeky user anyway). When the user tries to disable a toolbar in IE8, the browser also prompts whether to disable related BHOs. And I bet that most users are uncomfortable disabling BHOs because the name sounds foreign.

Short of replacing the way toolbars work on IE now, I think the only solution for all the toolbars that already exist is for users to hate them as much as we do. Perhaps some sort of user education would help?

But many people don't seem to care, and may even feel that all the toolbars are useful to them. And if they don't care either way, perhaps you shouldn't feel quite so bad for them. It's not difficult to remove toolbars, and if you're not computer-savvy enough to do that, ask your computer-savvy friend how to do it.

To me it's funny that you worry about toolbars that collect your browsing information and ignore the extent in which Chrome does the same.

It's true Google has their tracking scripts on most of the web pages today but what Chrome does in the background seems to be one dimension more. The only difference from the toolbars is that you're not aware of it as the browser "is faster than other ones."

but what Chrome does in the background seems to be one dimension more.

How would you know that?

Try to analyze the traffic. See if something goes to Google even for the sites that don't already have Google's tracking scripts on them.

I know, "it's all for convenience of user."

reminds me of uninstalling all the toolbars whenever I get home... You won't believe whenever I see my parents home desktop, half of the browser is taken up by these toolbars..strangely people don't even care about getting rid of them (not to mention dont know what to do with them as well)

Will you in anyway use Amazon less? Assuming not, I don't really see why these companies would stop.

On top of that, most people using these toolbars don't have a problem with them even after being told about their drawbacks.

It's a disease!

http://www.scapegoatmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/too...

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