How to Easily Remove Unwanted Browser Toolbars

Whenever I am visiting a non-geek, a normal, non-tech savvy person, I am always amazed by the amount of useless toolbars I find in his/her computer. It’s like they always want to increase their collection, and burden their browsers even more. What happens is this – they download and install a lot of free programs that come with “gifts” or “add-ons”. And these gifts, many times happen to be toolbars that you actually don’t need.

And when you don’t expect it, you’ll end up searching on the web not using good ol’ Google – another company that wants to make a few bucks through advertising. Most people will go directly to Control Panel and uninstall what they have mistakenly downloaded from there. But there are some other methods, as well, such as toolbar removers or solutions found within the browsers.

Uninstall from Control Panel

This is the good old way that many of you probably know already. If you’re using a Windows operating system, you just need to go to Control Panel and the uninstall the naughty toolbars from there. The disadvantage of this method is that you have to manually select which software to uninstall and, sometimes, these toolbars can “hide” under names that won’t become suspicious at first sight.

So, let’s say I want to install the free version of Winamp and I’m not careful during the installation process. Winamp will add a toolbar of its own in my computer. When I realize I don’t need that toolbar, I go to Control Panel >Programs > Uninstall. And from there I pick the toolbar I want to remove.

But there are toolbars that somehow get past our careful unchecking process. And sometimes, they come with other free software that we don’t really need. For this matter, a dedicated toolbar remover software is much more useful than relying on the defaut solution.
Another advantage of these toolbar removal tools is that they completely wipe the unwanted program from your computer. Also, there are dedicated cleaners for certain browsers, which should assure a 100% “purification”. If you won’t delete these annoying additions, they will make your browsers crash. But before jumping on to them, let’s see what solutions we can find in our own browsers where we can find toolbar removers for every one of them. You can follow the step-by-step instructions written below or the associated screenshots.

Toolbar Remover for Firefox

If you have Firefox, then you should be able to get rid of toolbars much easier, if Firefox detects them as add-ons. You need to go to Tools, and then in the Add-on section you’ll see the toolbars that you want gone. Here’s the complete instruction:

Top of the Firefox window > click on Firefox button > Add-ons
Select the Extensions panel
Select the toolbar you want to disappear
Click “Remove”
Click Restart now if it pops up

Toolbar remover for Internet Explorer

Someone might not like Internet Explorer on the basis that it isn’t as secure as other browsers. That probably was true with previous version but currently, IE is secure enough and also comes with the right steps to remove unwanted toolbars:

Click Tools > Manage add-ons.
Highlight Toolbars and Extensions below ‘Add-on Types’.
Under ‘Show:’ drop-down, make sure All add-ons is selected.
Pick the toolbar you wish to remove, and choose Disable.
Ignore the warning window.

Toolbar remover for Chrome

The process on the Chrome browser is also very simple. What’s good is that using these methods you can also uninstall unwanted extension that you could’ve forgotten about. Here’s how to do it:

Click the Chrome menu in the browser toolbar
Click Tools
Select Extensions
Click the trash can icon near the extension you want removed
Click ‘Remove’ on the confirmation dialog

Best toolbar removers

For those of you that really want their computers clean and are very careful with what they have installed, then you might be interested in the following dedicated toolbar removers:

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