Thursday, October 16, 2008

When will Microsoft learn not to play with users?

Okay, 

Now that anger is out on the title of the post, let's get the facts straight.

I got an email from Microsoft today and to get 100 bonus points, decided to try their toolbar. See previous post here.  Installation of the toolbar was fine, i skirted the obvious options to change my default page and default search engine and did the plain toolbar install. Worked just fine. All it needed was to exit my IE and run it again after installation and did first search. Now comes the cons:
  • When you use toolbar, it automatically does like "auto sense" or behaves like Google Suggest. There is no way to disable it.
  • The feature is very slow, which means you have to wait long between keystrokes.
Anyways, Since I got my 100 bonus points after doing first search, I decided to uninstall the toolbar. Uninstall process was almost smooth. It required me to shutdown my IE obviously. Now comes disaster: It started changing few registry settings. Lavasoft ad-watch running on my pc caught these. This is what it tried to do:
  • Change default search to MSN by changing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search\SearchAssistant to http://search.live.com/sphome.aspx
  • Change default page of the browser by changing HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page to http://www.msn.com
  • Change search engine for the user by setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Search Page to http://search.live.com
It is entirely outrageous to change these settings without informing user beforehand.


Once 

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