Ask HN: When will the toolbar madness end?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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."