Google Toolbar

[nightowl]

Is it good or bad, I've been reading its great for killing popups.But is there a downside. Is it filled with Spyware like some of these other toolbars?..........Jim

[ECA]

What I heard..
Nop its not. But I cant use it, it locks me up.
I went to mozilla.
Its a bit of a pain, and you need to DL all the drivers for Java, QT, and so forth, and it dont work on some site, which could be a good thing, as Im getting about 100 spam and 1 Virus warning aday.
But it has Adblocker, and refresh on your Fav folder.
Its closed all that IE lets in. And dont give much out to the sites, UNLESS you tell it to.

[nightowl]

Yea, I dont like toolbars. They drive me nuts. I have a program called Spyhunter. The new update has a Pop up blocker, I may give it a try.........Jim

[IronSerif]

I use the google toolbar, but haven't really used any additional features like the popup blocker. Just mainly for the search. Works well so far and no problems yet

[Ioman]

The pop-up blocker in the google toolbar works pretty good. I have it installed on one of my other computers.

[ECA]

Mozilla has it built in, and you can add others if you wish

[nightowl]

I just tried the Spyhunter Pop up Blocker, works pretty good but Adaware picks up the registry files from it. I had to put them in my ignore list.

[ECA]

That is something to look at, as with Spyblaster it picks up the LOG files where all your info and such are and lets you delete them so others cant use them against you.

[neuroking]

I love the Google toolbar. It's the only pop-up blocking toolbar that plays nice with MyIE2, and the pop-up blocking is great! I get around a 90% success rate on pop-ups, which is about as good as yo ucan get before stability problems. I used to use PopUpCop, which was just awesome, but sometimes sites basically insist on some pop-up type actions, and PUC would eventually crash because of it, around once/day. Google has been the best compromise I've seen.

There's no spyware, but you can elect to enable the 'advanced features' which allows you to vote on sites, etc. That info is tracked, but you are provided with the option to disable it during install.

Hope that helps.

[llbbl]

Google is the best toolbar that I have found. It is the only thing that I use.

The only aspect that could be considered spyware is in how it integrates PageRank into the toolbar and reports back to google on how often people visit certain sites based on their content. All that is concerned with is the "popularity" of the website to improve their content and your search results when you use the toolbar or the website. Its really using the community feedback to make their product better.