FaceSmooch

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 09, 2011

One thing we hate is a program that installs and replaces things on our computer without our permission. It's just plain rude. While FaceSmooch does indeed supply animated emoticons you can use in Facebook chat, its shady tactics prevent us from recommending it.

FaceSmooch overtakes your browser by adding a toolbar and replacing your default homepage without your permission. The homepage resembles the Google homepage, but with a suspicious-looking animated ad at the bottom. The toolbar includes a search field and buttons for YouTube, the weather, a radio, and games. But you can't actually access any of the toolbar's features from the toolbar itself. You have to click a button to open the feature in a new window, and, to be quite honest, with all the issues we had with the program's other features, we didn't do so as we were afraid it would put our computer at risk. We moved on to FaceSmooch's main feature, the animated smiley faces for Facebook. Clicking on the feature on the toolbar opens a menu for the smileys, but clicking on them opens a warning from Facebook saying, "The Web site directing you here was not a Facebook page. If you entered your Facebook log-in information on the previous site, you will need to reset your password." We stopped there. We didn't want to take the chance.

FaceSmooch installs items without your permission, but it does uninstall cleanly. We do not recommend this program.