Why does Oracle insist on bundling the Ask toolbar with Java updates? I can understand making a little money to offset the costs of a freely distributed product. But is the money worth the ire of every internet user in the marketplace? Just type “Ask toolbar” into Google and you see hundreds of articles about user frustration and instructions for removing the useless thing. It truly belongs in the category of malware.
Ask is not even a decent search engine. OK, it works fine if you are looking for Justin Bieber news, but it sucks at technical and scholarly searches. On the other hand, the money paid to Oracle and other software vendors is probably the only thing keeping Ask corporation alive. A truly despicable business model with no redeeming traits.
Yes, there is a checkbox to opt-out of the toolbar. Yes, I have missed this checkbox during one of the many routine updates of Java that occur each month. Then I have to go through the chore of removing the junk from my browsers.
There is a way to avoid the Java installation trap on Windows OS at least, something that deserves to be passed around. It does require a registry change, but that is not that difficult. Just create a textfile with the extension .reg, this is a registry modifiction script. Cut and paste the snippet of code below into this text file, save and double click to execute… Done.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft]
"SPONSORS"="DISABLE"[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\JavaSoft]
"SPONSORS"="DISABLE"
Unfortunatly this only works for Java, keep an eye out for other sneaky install options from Ask. At least Java is the only one I usually encounter.
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