I’ve used the IE version of the Google Toolbar since it was released. I started using the beta of the latest version, which contains the wonderful bookmarking feature as soon as I learned of it. In all this time, I can’t say I’ve ever had a problem with the toolbar, it just works. After upgrading to IE7, I’ve experienced a number of crashes, some of which seem to be related to Google Toolbar.
I have a machine at work, and one at home, both running IE7, and both running the latest version of Google Toolbar. At least a few times a week IE7 will completely freeze up as I type in the Google Toolbar search box. As I type, I get the drop down window showing matching history, bookmarks, etc, and then IE7 will freeze so I can’t even see the cursor if it’s over the IE7 window. I can move the curser around outside of the IE7 window, bring other applications forwared and work in them, etc. If I minimize the other apps out of the way, I’m left with a blank IE7 window. What’s strange is that the window can be moved around, though I get an hourglass if I move over the body of the window. The drop down menu from the Google Toolbar remains open, and does not move, even if I move the IE7 window (see images below).
Again, this is happening frequently on two different computers, so it’s more than just a corrupt install. Have you experienced this problem? If so, leave a comment here, perhaps we can see how widespread it is, or at least find some commonality to track it’s cause.
January 13th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Yes. I have almost the exact same problem. The cursor disappears while entering text or if it’s over the Googlebar; no fix except to click inside the IE address or search box – then go back to Googlebar and the cursor is visible – but the history drop-down is probably in the way. It takes a while to get it all normalized.
I like the word-find and highlight feature of the Googlebar much better than the cumbersome IE7 Find feature.
I wish I had fixes but oh well…
January 13th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I actually got a note from the Google Toolbar team about this post. They suggested the following:
Thank you for your note. You may be able to prevent this freeze by disabling the Suggest feature, which displays suggestions in your searchbox drop-down. To do so, please follow these steps:
1. Click “Settings” > “Options.”
2. Click the “Search Box Settings” button.
3. The last three check boxes allow you to select which features are enabled in the search box drop-down. Although “suggest popular searches”
may be the only feature causing IE to hang, you may want to disable all three options to be sure.
I’ve since changed my setup (switched to FireFox when their updated Google toolbar came out) so it’s no longer an issue for me.
February 17th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Joe, I am using Vista Home Premium and IE7 (on a new computer, I didn’t upgrade from XP). I downloaded the Google Toolbar and it only shows up as a grayed out option when I right mouse click in a menu bar. I have uninstalled it and tried reinstalling it, same problem.
Also, there were _no_ error messages from either MS or Google during the installation process.
February 17th, 2007 at 10:39 am
This is a follow up. I don’t know what I did (or if I did anything), but I renstalled the toolbar and this time it worked.
I did poke around in Windows Defender but did not change any settings as far as I know.
Maybe Google updated the Toolbar – I don’t know except that it now works.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I was wondering why people actually use ANY toolbar. What are the features that people get from Google Toolbar that makes it such a great tool to install. Especially now with Vista where you can search and find anything almost from anywhere and find anything. No need for Google Toolbar or Google Desktop anymore IMO. Where’s the need?
March 6th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
I can’t live without it. Mostly for Google Bookmarks. By storing my bookmarks in Google bookmarks, they are totally portable. I can login on any computer with the toolbar and have complete access to my bookmarks without having to worry about syncing, or if it’s IE or Firefox (and without the toolbar you can still access them on the web). What’s even nicer with the Firefox Google toolbar is that you can type in the search box and it will guess what your typing based on your bookmarks, your history, or finally just general suggestions of popular searches, which usually saves time. Everyone works differently, but for someone that works on many different computers, and reloads their main machines often (I’m always testing and refreshing things), this toolbar has made me not have to think about bookmarks, they’re just always there…
March 20th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Hi,
IE7 has just started crashing every time I open it!! I have re-installed twice to no effect. Then I read the article at:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2006/07/16/104854.aspx
I found out by trial and error that if Google Desktop is running IE7 will crash immediately. If I open IE7 first, then Google Desktop, IE7 behaves, but if I open another browser window after Google Desktop is running, then it just crashes again. Oops.
Hope this helps someone
Regards
Steve
May 8th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I’m having the same stupid problem with IE 7 and Vista Home Premium.
I like Google’s response. We know there’s a problem, so disable one of the features of the toolbar and that should fix it. I see that this problem has been around for at least six months, so why haven’t they fixed it yet?
May 24th, 2007 at 5:53 am
I just recently started experiencing difficulties. I too have Vista and IE7. My bookmarks first kept telling me to “sign in”. Never did before! Then when I did get signed in, they were gone. Now I am also getting a blank explorer screen before my requested screen opens. Then the blank screen is still there. It has also been very slow to load or close at times and I will ocasionally get an authentication error but, it will open the next time I try!! Go figure. I haven’t yet!
June 13th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
In answer to E-NY, I love the Spellcheck feature, and especially the Autolink button, which will highlight all the postal addresses on a web page and immediately take you the appropriate map if you click on one. The highlight button is also extremely useful for finding all occurrences 0f your search terms in a document. The button to search within the site your at is often useful. The Previous/Next buttons were useful before IE7’s Tabs came along.
July 1st, 2007 at 5:21 am
Thanks, I tried the Google suggestion and it seems to be working. Now if they would just fix the problem.
Cheers.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
FYI, if you install the Toolbar and it does not display, check that it has been enabled by going to Tools-Manage Add Ons-Enable or Disable Add Ons.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I had the same problem.
Here is what I did to get the Google toolbar link back.
On IE 7, go to
Tools
manage Add-ons
Enable or Disable Add-ons
Select Google toolbar & click the Enable radio button
October 8th, 2007 at 2:57 am
i.e. approximately 15
which remark refers to the spam protection questions. and if someone is mathematically illiterate?
anyhow. i experienced same. The fault I think isn’t with google team. I reset ie7 to its defaults, but told it to keep the Google toolbar (it complained Google search engine is set to default, and if I wish to keep things so – i said i wished). After the reset, same sad story: IE needs to close. So I had run ie7 with add ons switched off (by right-clicking the ie7 icon you can choose the option: run without extentions). Then manually switched the extentions on, almost one by one. Everything worked fine, until i included google array of add ons (toolbar, helper, whatsoever). Then Vista miawoed: WinDefender (DEP) shut down the service. I told DEP not to monitor Google toolbar or any Google apps; allowed all of Google pack to connect to the internet through Vista firewall too. It didn’t help. Trouble is: I can only allow exe files under DEP. I suspect some of Google things are designed as dll. And these are happily blocked by the Micro & Soft.
I am not a ‘puter geek; on top am on Vista Home (so am sort of nonadmin admin; the real administrator account being disabled by the reseller on MS instruction. the real threat to the system are neither spammers nor viruses but its user?). If anyonyone finds a work around, please let me know.
have a nice day (under firefox, as the IE doesn’t work)
November 21st, 2007 at 7:10 am
Well I didn’t want to say it, but here is a case of irresponsible behavior on the part of Google. They KNOW it’s a but because users have been complaining about this for a while now – http://groups.google.com/group/IEToolbar-Group-Bugs/browse_thread/thread/04633323f0b1ede5/bbe6296c37419e7f but it’s not a priority to fix as we can just switch to Firefox right? Does this behavior remind you of Micro$oft when they stopped making bugfixes for their old OS just because they had a NEW one?
What is the effect of this bug? It crashes IE and makes browsing unstable! Alas the only way to get around this bug is to disable “suggest popular searches” like Joe indicated earlier in this post using the following instructions –
1. Click “Settings” > “Options.”
2. Click the “Search Box Settings” button.
3. The last three check boxes allow you to select which features are enabled in the search box drop-down. Although “suggest popular searches”
may be the only feature causing IE to hang, you may want to disable all three options to be sure.
JUST TO BE CLEAR – THIS BUG IS ALMOST A YEAR OLD ERGO MY POST!!!! (REFERENCE THE START AND END OF THIS THREAD.)
December 5th, 2007 at 5:44 am
I had this problem on WinXP with IE7, and still have it after a clean install of WinVista with IE7.
I don’t really want to disable ’suggest’ as I find it’s actually quite a good feature when I’m not sure which words are best for a given search.
Is there still no solution?
December 5th, 2007 at 11:33 am
I doesn’t look like Google is serious about fixing IE7 toolbar bugs for now. I am signed into their newsgroup and there isn’t much going on. I would stick to using it on firefox and disable the ’suggest’ feature on IE7.
I have since uninstalled Google Desktop which became really crappy too on Vista. Does anyone see a trend of poor Google application programming on the PC?
It is weird because their applications were top-notch not so long ago. I wander what happened.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:25 am
So Joe… I got on my computer this morning, as I have done every morning for years new and I noticed that my toolbar was differant, my google toolbar was missing. Thinking the kids had somehow turned it off or something, I right clicked on the area and found the gogle toolbar there, but grayed out. I tried re-installing it, but still grayed out. What happened? Is it the resuluts of another midnight attack by Microsoft disquised as a security update or hotfix? I really like google toolbar and although I could probably make it through the next few months without it, I really don’t want to, please, how do I bring it back.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Presumably you are using Internet Explorer. If so, go to tools, then Manage Add-ons, and enable anything related to Google toolbar. Let me know if it works!
April 21st, 2008 at 3:40 am
Stilll no fix?
April 21st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
I think there is a beta of the next version of the toolbar, but I’ve switched to FireFox (one of my better decisions in life) so I can’t be sure.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 am
Well I would switch to Firefox too but there is one great thing about IE that I can’t get Firefox to do…
I same my favourites as single numbers or letters (eg “b” or “3″) and when I type these single digits in my address bar and press enter, it takes me to the site.
Can’t seem to do that with Firefox so it would decrease my browing pace considerably!
And I definitely have the latest version of Google Toolbar which just keeps crashing if the predictive feature is on.. but my browsing is also hindered without that feature. So I’m really not sure what to do.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 am
*Save, not same
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:49 am
@Jonny Actually, you can do that if you use the Google Toolbar and Google Bookmarks. I have all my bookmarks in Google Bookmarks, so when I type in the Google search window, it tries not only to guess common addresses, and addresses from my history, but also bookmarks. You can rename your bookmark entries to anything you like, so it seems it should do what you want. Give it a try!
May 13th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Lately, whenever I open an Internet shortcut from my desktop, IE7 (7.0.5730.1115) opens and tells me that it needs to close, sorry.
However, if I first manually open IE and then click on the shortcut, I don’t experience any problems.
I do have Google Toolbar (5.0.112.7760/big/en (GGLL) and Notifier (3.0.914.9778) installed.
I have “Open links from other programs in a new window” checked as I don’t want to overwrite what I happen to be doing.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I just went into Tools -> Manage Add-Ons (IE7 Menu) and chose Enable or Disable Add-Ons. When it pulled up the list there it was, Google (under Name column) Toolbar (under Type column) Disabled (under Status column). I clicked on it and chose the Enable radio button, and low and behold it is not grayed out anymore. How could something so annoying for so long end up with such an easy fix? Turds.