How to Hide and Remove Unwanted Toolbars from Internet Explorer and Firefox

A lot of software these days comes bundled with extra software such as additional (and often useless) toolbars for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The software packages often hide these extraneous toolbars within the installation process and, as a result, users often fail to disable them from installing. While you may find some of these toolbars useful, they can begin to pile up at the top of your browser, leaving you with very little work space. Below are instructions to remove these pesky toolbars from both Internet Explorer and Firefox:

Internet Explorer

To remove unnecessary or unwanted toolbars from your Internet Explorer web browser, first open Internet Explorer. Right click anywhere on any of the toolbars below the address bar (the address bar is the bar at the top, where you type in URLs). This will bring up a pop-up menu that shows all installed toolbars and special buttons for Internet Explorer. To remove a toolbar, simply click its name in the menu to uncheck the toolbar. The unwanted toolbar should now be gone. If you wish to re-enable the toolbar, simply right click under the address bar as you did before and click the toolbar you wish to bring back

Mozilla Firefox

The procedure for removing toolbars from Firefox is very similar to the procedure for doing so with Internet Explorer. Simply open Firefox and right click any empty space between the address bar and the tab bar (the bar which all your open tabs are displayed on). As with Internet Explorer, this will open a pop-up menu, where you can select which toolbars you wish to disable. To re-enable any toolbars, repeat the process and select the toolbar you wish to use again (it will be unchecked).

To permanently remove unwanted toolbars so that they don't appear in the toolbar selection pop-up menu, they must be uninstalled. To do this, click the Windows start button. From here, select Control Panel. If using Windows 7, select Programs (select Programs and Features in Vista, and Add or Remove Programs in Windows XP). From here, find the name of the toolbar you wish to uninstall in the list of programs, right click it, and select Uninstall. This will completely remove the unwanted toolbar from your PC.