My Insights

As you can tell from my previous post, I was planning to experiment how things would go if I chose to let every installer molest my Internet Explorer. I installed 5 toolbars in total - Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, Windows Live Toolbar, eBay Toolbar and Verizon Broadband Toolbar. I couldn’t download the AOL Toolbar from behind my proxy so that one got kicked out of the experiment.

Please click this image for a hi-res view. As you can see, this makes my IE extremely cluttered and displeasing to look at. Here are a couple of comments on these toolbars-

Google Toolbar - Love the search engine. I think the UI of the toolbar has gotten worse from the very first version. I associate google with simplicity and I don’t get the picture of simplicity by looking at this toolbar

Verizon Broadband Toolbar - Why do you have a toolbar and who actually installs this willingly. I think most computers running this toolbar are owned by people who let Verizon technicians install software on their computer. These technicians are trained to let the customer think that the software they are installing is actually needed to connect to their DSL/FIOS service. I would like to get to know at least one person who finds this toolbar useful and has willingly downloaded and installed this

eBay Toolbar - OK, I can see a use for this toolbar for people like me who may want one-click access to “My eBay” and their Paypal accounts. I am however slightly concerned with the immediate prompt for my eBay and Paypal passwords during the install process. I think what this toolbar accomplishes for me can very well be done using Bookmarks. A glorified toolbar is just a luxury.

Yahoo Toolbar - I think the online market is divided primarily between Yahoo and MSN users. That being said, I am on the MSN (Windows Live) side of things and I like it here. This toolbar seems to be the direct competitor of its MSN (Windows Live) equivalent. I like how the toolbar has implemented tabbed functionality in IE 6. Opening each new tab also opens up a new window on your taskbar so I’m not sure exactly what this tabbed functionality accomplishes. All I will say is that I liked what I saw so far but I’m just not yet ready to uproot and switch from Microsoft to Yahoo.

Windows Live Toolbar - Let me start by saying that I am addicted to Microsoft products and can’t get enough of Office 2007 Beta 2. Therefore, I am biased towards this toolbar. That being said, I must say that the last time I tried this toolbar (2 months ago), Windows Live Search’s response time was too slow for me and I convinced myself to stick with Google Search. This time however, it seems like the lag time between user-input and the search results has improved significantly. I will uninstall everything else and give this toolbar another shot. The other thing I like about this toolbar is the tabbed functionality that is implemented using an IE 7 like user interface. I think I forgot to mention that I am using a Windows 2000 machine (at work). Therefore, I believe that the Windows Live Toolbar on IE6 (Windows 2000) provides an experience that is closest to IE7 on Windows XP.

I just recently downloaded and installed J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 (Update 6). Seems like a normal install that should normally be done in the background. I was however surprised to see that the installation was done using a Windows Installer that required the user to click ‘Next’ like a monkey.

I was further surprised when the installer tried to put Google Toolbar (default option) on my computer. The same screen also offered to install Google Desktop on my computer (Optional option). Since when did Sun and Google collaborate like this. Better yet, what does the Google toolbar have ANYTHING to do with the J2SE Runtime Environment??

It just seems like nowadays, everybody is trying to put everything on your computer. Can you imagine an Internet Explorer window with the Yahoo Toolbar, Google Toolbar, AOL Toolbar, Windows LIVE Toolbar and some other junk Toolbars? It makes me shudder. Perhaps I will try it and post a screenshot later.