If I wanted my Web browser to look like a PC’s browser with its half-dozen toolbars, well, I’d be on a PC not a Mac system. In any case, if you did install the “Search App by Ask” and the Ask Toolbar, next time you’re on a Web page in your Google Chrome browser, it’ll look like this:ĭefinitely not to my taste. Then again, I think this is relatively recent and that previous Java updates were a lot more sly about the process.

So it’s not like they’re entirely hiding the process from us users. To start, when you go through the install, you will have to click past this window: Not good, it’s not a very good search engine and in any case, that’s something you should do consciously, not something that’s done on the sly. What’s frustrating is that it turns out that not only does the Ask toolbar get installed, but your default search engine is switched from whatever you have set up to Ask.com too. You do have to okay the install as part of updating your own Java runtime on your Mac system, but I expect that most people are just going to click thru the process without realizing what they’re saying “yes” to, so… I think it might be a bit much to call this malware as I don’t think it’s actually doing anything evil or bad to your computer or your browser, but the way that it’s installed as part of the Oracle Java 8.0 update is definitely more than a bit questionable.

Uninstalling chrome on mac