Organizing IE7 Toolbars - Google hijacks toolbar layout.

Gustavo Holloway

What a Horrible experience has been using IE7. First I can't put more bars in the same row as the address bar So I get a incredibly big address bar and loose a lot of screen.

Other problem is that toolbars dont stay in the place you put them. They keep moving even if you lock the toolbars. Is this a Primary BUG at IE7 Is there anyway to make IE 7 as useful as IE6 and customize bars the way I want and not the way the developers wanted

Thank you in advance for solutions....

dmky11

I HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM AND WOULD VERY MUCH WANT MICROSOFT SHOULD FIX IT BY A PATCH IN WINDOWS UPDATE OR SOME OTHER WAY

THANKS

DAVID

IECUSTOMIZER

Hi All,

Toolbar tip - This applies to all versions of Internet Explorer. I have been using IE since the mid 90's and it was only recently that I discovered this toolbar trick, quite by accident.

Keep your toolbars unlocked and to minimize screen usage place all of your toolbars on the one line, though any more than 4 toolbars per line seems to be not allowed (this may be different for wide screen monitors).

Each toolbar has a chevron on the left hand side ("|"). Double click on this chevron and the toolbar display will expand or contract to show the toolbar contents.

I think this why the toolbar control in Internet Explorer is called the re-bar. TG that the IE7 dev team decided to retain the rebar in IE7. The early beta versions used Office toolbars.

Brian 1

Same problem. With IE6 I was able to keep all necessary tools in the address bar. I hope this is an oversite by developers and will be corrected ASAP. I am going back to IE6 for now.

Mike McAllister

I have the same trouble. I am running IE7 on WinXP Professional with the Google and Yahoo toolbars in addition to the Classic Menu Bar, Links, and Status Bar. I have set the Links bar in the same bar as the Yahoo bar which is in the same bar as the Classic Menu bar and have also tried to set the Links bar within the Google bar.

EVERY time I close the IE7 window, the Links bar drops down to form it's own bar and sometimes the Yahoo bar does this as well. This is in spite of me unlocking the toolbars, setting them up as described above and locking the toolbar.

How do I force IE7 to remember the toolbar layout as I have chosen

Thanks,
Mike

Viktor78

>Is there anyway to make IE 7 as useful as IE6 and customize bars the way I want and not the way the developers wanted

Yes, I am working on a toolbar that is designed to replace the standard navigation bar of IE7. And there are several tweaks buried in the Windows registry as well to customize the UI.

http://www.quero.at/

Viktor

Notes

Thanks Rob, for the tip... and Viktor, for your suggestion... But both are irrelevant to the OP's message.

I obviously also experience the same problem... and (as some of you probably did...) found this tread doing a Google search in hopes that someone actually had a *solution* to it! :(

Does anyone at MS read these postings... Does anyone know if MS is going to DO anything about this annoying problem

Some toolbars just -won't- stay where they're put... Which makes for a bunch of wasted space... Clearly it's not the end of the world or anything, but it is certainly annoying!

Anyone from MS...

Cheers

IECUSTOMIZER

Here's the test plan to show how the Google toolbar hijacks the Toolbar layout in IE7 (untested in 6)

Start IE7 and unload the Google toolbar (if loaded) and just to be safe, any other third-party toolbars that you have installed. Arrange your remaining IE7 toolbars to your pleasure. I have the Menus and Links toolbars on the top line. Close IE7 to save your toolbar layout.

Open IE7 and it should show the last retained toolbar layout.... as expected.

Load the Google toolbar. Place it on a line of its own. Close IE to save the Toolbar layout..

Open IE7 and you will see that the toolbar layout has changed... All toolbars are displayed on their own lines...

Select the Tools>Manage Addons menu and find and disable the 'Google Toolbar Browser Helper' (the BHO part). Re-arrange the toolbars to your pleaseure.... note that the Google toolbar is still visible even though the BHO component has been disabled. (acutually it is still in memory, but it won't be loaded the next time the browser is started).

Close IE7 to save your toolbar layout.

Open IE7 and this time it should have retained your saved toolbar layout.

Conclusion - The Google toolbar hijacks ITBarLayout from within its satelite BHO. Disabling the satelite BHO of the Google toolbar returns toolbar layout behavior.

Other known hijackers - Del.icio.us toolbar

Seems to be a misunderstanding by toolbar developers to use a satelite BHO to write to ITBarLayout to force their toolbars to be displayed in the toolbar, dispite the users preferences.

For those of you with RegMon.exe - Place a hook on the satelite bho to track the registry writes to ITBarLayout.

Regards.

ES Blu

There seems to be only only one solution to this and that's sticking all the toolbars that move before the google one in one row and that will force them to stay there and remember the position.

Notes

ES Blu:  That's great if it works for you... But I just tried it and it doesn't work even if I take out my links toolbar (which is pretty much a whole row on it's own, so with it I couldn't put all of them on one row)

Rob: That worked!  - So the Google BHO doesn't actually do anything useful...   It seems like my Google toolbar is still there and functional without it.

Thanks!

Cheers

feathers

I just wanted to thank you for that helpful post. I have been beating my head against a brick wall, so to speak, in frustration from not being able to make my toolbars behave -- ever since I was "given" IE7 about a month ago. I suspected Google might be my problem all along, but didn't know enough to remove the BHO!

Finding out that others have had the same problem makes me feel less, uh, crazy!

So far, all is well now! I am so grateful!

 

Eyce

Man, you need to get that information into TechNet so we don't have to use GOOGLE to find the answer. Thanks a TON IECustomizer!!! I nearly lost an entire day at work trying to fix my PC, and MS really needs to get this published.

Oh, and thanks for giving me another place to fiddle-around with IE. Nice to know where things are. :-) I never bothered to look there.

delaltctrl

You need to get this out to everyone (Google, MSDev, Forums around the Globe). I don't know how many hours I've spent researching this problem. There is a lot of misinfo about this problem in various "expert" forums, including registry edits and various herbal remedies, but none of it works. As a longtime sufferer from OCD, you might have saved me months worth of supplemental therapy. Your solution is pretty hard to find: I wish the masses could be told of its relevance. Thank-you!

IECUSTOMIZER

k,

Its pretty hard to find the right door in these large organizations. I was bagged out in another forum for suggesting that the fault lay with the Google toolbar and not IE7. I will do a write up and publish it and hopefully the powers that be may catch sight of it and put in the fix with an update to the Google toolbar. In the mean time I have published the Disable the Google BHO component registry tweak at

http://www.iecustomizer.com/ url=DisableGoogleBHODownload.asp

This is for the average user who may find my instructions for locating and disabling the BHO component of the Google toolbar beyond theirselves.(If there are any Vista/IE7 users out there I would be grateful if you could post back that the above fix works on your environment... untested yet on Vista... should work, just adds an entry to the Addon managers list of disabled extensions in the registry)

I was kinda expecting Google to have picked up on this feature of their toolbar as per their 'do no evil' software policy. Seems alot of IE7 users mistake to Google toolbar layout hijack for an IE7 feature.

It is not just the Google toolbar that has this feature. Also the delicious toolbar... (IE6 SP1/SP2)... that I have found so far.

So beware....If you find that you cannot customize the layout of your IE7 toolbar, it is most probably because of an Add-on toolbar that has a satellite BHO that rewrites the ToolbarLayout each time IE is started. The only other possible cause is the Group Policy setting to allow toolbar customizations.

Regards.

krsarge

Thank you for your comments!

Even when I start a new window, the Upromise toolbar is gone and I have to add it again.

Maybe I will switch to Firefox