A toolbar is something that lives at the top of the window of an application. Apps like the ones in Microsoft’s Office suite (Word, Excel, etc.) have toolbars built into the apps, to provide users with quick access to certain “tools” used by the app (hence the name “toolbar”).
About ten or so years ago, people started making add-on toolbars for web browsers. Some of them were quite useful back then, but as time has gone one, that usefulness has been eroded. In fact they have more or less become the opposite of useful. Microsoft even deemed one of them to be “malware” last year.
I was installing a video chat application on my PC the other day. After downloading the application and running the installation, I was presented with a screen that asked me if I wanted the Ask.com toolbar installed and for my default search engine to be switched to Ask.com. The two boxes associated with these choices were already checked. If I had clicked “Continue”, then my Chrome web browser would have the Ask toolbar added to the top of the window, every time I opened it. All my searches would now be routed through Ask instead of Google. Luckily I spotted this and unchecked the two boxes before continuing on with the installation. On the next screen it tried to get me to install “Weatherbug” – another nuisance addition to my browser. No thank you! Even though it is possible to uninstall these things aterward, it’s not necessarily straight-forward, and if you delay doing so, other problems can start to appear.
Lots of apps (usually free ones) will try this kind of thing during the install process. They get a kickback for every unlucky user that they “recruit”. Sadly, even well know companies like Adobe get up to these tricks (by the way, you don’t need the Adobe Reader app anymore – you can add a Chrome browser extension that will handle that task for you and save you a lot of disk space in the process).
My dad has been plagued by toolbars. At one point he had so many of them installed he hardly had any room left on his browser window to see the actual web pages (like the image at the top of this post)! He just didn’t realize what was going on. Some toolbars are borderline malware, while other can be somewhat useful to some people. If in any doubt, stay away from them. In fact, when installing any application on your machine, go very slowly and carefully, making sure to read the fine print on each page of the installation and making sure to uncheck / opt out of any offers to add additional things beyond the original program install – all you want is the actual program, not all the extras they try to foist on you. Otherwise you might end up like my poor dad!