Today I found MySpace’s Official Toolbar. And long story short, its cheap, bad, and a reason to stop using MySpace…pretty much. First of all, about time, myspace. Facebook has released an official (and quite good) Facebook Toolbar a while ago, to replace all the ad-infested user made ‘unofficial’ toolbars. Myspace users have had to rely on unofficial toolbars up until now. Today I noticed that myspace has ads pointing to http://www.myspace.com/toolbar, so I was interested and downloaded it. The first thing about it is that instead of complying to firefox/opensource standards and uploading the toolbar in firefox extension format so it can be installed with one click (as well as uploading it to the firefox extensions directory itself), they have an executable file to install it. Suspicious… I’ll have to do an adware/spyware scan later. I proceeded to download and install the toolbar. Then, it installed, I restarted firefox, and I saw the myspace toolbar. First, I can’t customize the toolbar by moving around / removing components. I wanted to remove the google search, which is MySpace’s first shady move. I am perfectly aware that myspace would not include a google search in their toolbar out of good will. It’s using google’s adsense (the program they use on the rest of their site as well, for the banner ads). Every time you search through the toolbar, myspace gets money. Obviously I don’t like them sneakily using my browser usage to their advantage, so I wanted to remove the google search, but I couldnt because the toolbar was locked down.. Then I noticed that my Facebook toolbar disappeared!! So I look in Tools > Add-Ons, and I see “Not compatible with firefox 3.0.5″, 
while I know that it was working minutes ago. So this is why the myspace toolbar is an exe. It not only installs their locked down adware-infested toolbar, it also edits the facebook toolbar if you have it installed to make it seem as if it’s not compatible!!!
Congratulations myspace, you have stooped to a new low. I’m looking forward to the day when I finally decide to stop using your sneaky cash reaping website, and I urge all my readers to do the same.