You should only add toolbars that you will use. Having too many commercial toolbars causes problems.

When you are installing programs you will often see where the program wants to add a toolbar such as Google, Yahoo, AVG and others. Usually it is chosen by default. I would recommend you not install the toolbar unless you want to use it specifically. Toolbar hopping can be a bad thing.

Why would you want to add toolbars? They have the advantage of adding some features and shortcuts to products of that company or ones they endorse. The Google and Yahoo toolbars make their search engines more easily available. If you know the address for a site, use the address bar to type it in instead of the search box as you will be relying on the search tool to find the link, and then you’ll still need to choose from among the search results. Some sites you are going to may not be indexed by a search engine). One of the big features for which people added toolbars, was their pop-up blockers.

Why would you not want to add toolbars? They will take another row off your browser reducing the space (called real estate) available for the web pages to display causing you to have to scroll down more. They will conflict with each other. If you ever need to stop pop-up blocking this becomes a problem. There are times you want to allow pop-ups. Current browsers such as IE and Firefox include pop-up blockers in them. If you want to stop blocking pop-ups, you will need to turn that off in the browser and each toolbar.

My recommendation is to only use one toolbar that is not part of the browser or none at all.

Thanks to Charles for the question suggestion.

Send me your computer questions about computers and mention you read this in this paper. I choose a question to answer each week.

Dwight Watt is a computer instructor at a technical college in northwest Georgia and also does computer work for businesses, individuals and organizations in the Swainsboro area. His webpage is www.dwightwatt.com.