Not long after the first web browsers were released, third party companies started flooding the Internet with toolbar downloads. The add-ons were supposed to add functions to browsers but more often than not, they succeeded only in cluttering things up on screen or even reducing a PC"s performance.
This week, Google announced that it is making a policy change for its Chrome Web Store that will likely spell the end of the toolbar, at least for this browser. The policy page now states flat out, "... toolbars that provide a broad array of functionality or entry points into services are better delivered as separate extensions, so that users can select the services they want."
In a post on the Chromium blog, Google says that it won"t enforce the new policy changes for current extensions in the Chrome Web Store until June 2014, in order to give their creators time to change them. Any new extensions that are uploaded to the store will have to abide by the new policy immediately.
Microsoft and Mozilla still support toolbars in their desktop versions of the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, respectively. The Modern UI version of IE11 does not support such extensions.
Source: Google | Image via Google