I sort of got to be Jim Dinkey one recent Saturday evening, when a conversation with a friend led me to fix her computer remotely.
The Babylon Toolbar (BT) is foistware software that is insinuated onto your machine because you overlooked some negative option choice to keep it from happening.
What does the Babylon Toolbar do? Basically, it makes itself your search engine, in any browser. BT has a website, but I won’t even go there because I trust nothing about them. BT’s website shows up in the Google search for [babylon toolbar], but when all the other entries on the page are about how to remove it, you know it must be something unwanted. Interestingly, too, considering all the sites about it, Wikipedia doesn’t have a Babylon Toolbar page .
My friend had BT (Babylon Toolbar) in both of her browsers—Firefox (FF) and Internet Explorer (IE).
Full-disclosure statement: It’s happened to me, too. I once got the Babylon Toolbar (BT) on my machine, and, somehow, removed it, but don’t know exactly how.
Remote Access
To be able to give my fiend the help I thought I could, I talked her into and through downloading and installing Crossloop . I’ve used Crossloop several times with Jim Dinkey, but this time was my first “solo”. The experience went well.
First Attempt
I began my removal procedure by searching by uninstalling the Babylon software the usual way, via Windows’ Control Panel > Add or Remove procedure. Even after doing this, We still had BT in FF and IE, so I searched for and deleted all files with “Babylon” in the title, and, Guess What—we still had BT in FF and IE. Now what?
Removing BT from Firefox
I decided to try removing BT from FF first, because I believe that MS keeps IE fairly well locked up and FF is fairly open-source. But how might I do that?
Instinctively, I Google-searched for [remove babylon toolbar from firefox]
Of the many procedures presented via various sites, I chose this one——and it worked. Here it is (paraphrased).
- Access the about:config panel [by typing “about:config” in FF’s address bar].
- Do a search for “babylon” (without commas)
- Then, right click on every item found and select the option “Restore Default”
You can finish up by assigning a new FF home page. That’s it. Now, on to IE.
Removing BT from IE
I started, of course, by Google-searching for [remove babylon toolbar from internet explorer]
The procedure I used is found about halfway down this page.
Remember that the first things I did were to uninstall and remove all “babylon” software, but still the BT software appeared in IE.
- Open IE.
- Go to Tools /Internet Options.
- Select ‘General’ tab.
- In the Home Page area, click “Use default” or enter your own website name, google.com, or other instead of search.babylon.com.
- Finally, click ‘OK’ to save the changes.
Hooray! Goodbye Babylon Toolbar!
NOTE: Jim Dinkey found himself unable to write his blog this month, so I volunteered that I believe I have enough material to fill in. We’ll see. Jim recently bought a new Windows 7 desktop computer at Central Computers’ Sunnyvale store. I expect his blog in November will deal with his adventures getting the new machine set up to his satisfaction and getting his data from the old machine to the new one.