Although Ask Toolbar itself is not malicious or harmful in nature, it is often considered a privacy risk by security experts. Besides the Ask Toolbar often comes piggybacked with many other software and this is why many people frown at this toolbar. Nobody wants to see a toolbar being installed and have the homepage of their web browsers changes to ask.com without their explicit consent or knowledge. If you are also scratching your head over how the Ask Toolbar got installed in your computer and are unable to figure out how to get rid of then, then do not worry. It is very easy to remove or uninstall Ask Toolbar from your computer.
Ask Toolbar is not as pesky as some other toolbars. It comes with an uninstall utility of its own using which you can remove it from your computer. In order to remove it you have to first open the Programs and Features section in the Control Panel of Windows. Here you can see the list of all the installed programs in your PC. You have to find and select Ask Toolbar (or one of its variants) from this list, and then click on Uninstall. This will launch the Ask Toolbar uninstall program. Make sure you close all the web browser windows so that uninstallation can complete without any problems.
Another way to remove the Ask Toolbar is through the toolbar itself. Just open your web browser in which the Ask Toolbar is installed. Click on the gear-like settings icon on the right side of the toolbar. In the menu that pops-out, click on the Uninstall. This will launch the Ask Toolbar uninstall wizard and remove the toolbar from your system.
After you have removed the toolbar, you may want to reset your browser’s homepage and search engine back to the default values. You can do this manually by going through the settings of each of your browsers, or you can use the free avast! Browser Cleanup tool which can be downloaded either separately from the avast! website but also comes as an integrated part of the free avast! antivirus. In avast! Browser Cleanup, you can reset the settings for the top web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.) to default values just by clicking on the Reset Settings button for each of these browsers.
So if you are feeling annoyed at having your browser’s homepage and default search engine changed without your prior knowledge, then you can always remove the Ask Toolbar and restore the default homepage and search engine settings using the simple instructions above.