More Firefox Trouble

[Ripped Shirt Kirk]

Recently, I download the Goblins theme. It changed my default search to Bing. So I changed it back to Google. And then it goes to bing. In other words, my search engine in keyword.url keeps changing to http://www.bing.com/search?PC=BRTH&FORM=BT100D&q=, when I want it to be http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=. Is there any way to prevent this changing of search engines?

[Lioness]

My Opera search engine (in the speed dial) changed to Bing too, though I didn't update anything.

[valadil]

Does it still happen if you remove Goblins?

Could it possibly be a windows setting and not a firefox one?

[IonDragon]

Two options,

Hijack This!
and, Firefox Safemode should give you the option to reset to default search engine.

EDIT: Oh, and if all else fails there's always the option of exporting your bookmarks, uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox.

[Seonor]

Try to look if the bing toolbar got installed in your firefox (there are some addons that do that automaticly with a normal update). Just search in your addons for the toolbar and delete it, reset the search engine in about:config, restart your pc and hopefully it works as intendet again. If not look at your active process in the task manager and search for anything you don't recognise and post it here so we can help. At this point it would also be a good idea to run Malwerebytes and Hijack this!


Additionally look at this (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/microsoft-slips-ie-firefox-add-on-into-toolbar-update.ars) if you updated your windows in the last month. Here is the fix (http://support.mozilla.com/de/kb/Removing+the+Search+Helper+Extension+and+Bing+Bar) for that.

[KilltheToy]

My Opera search engine (in the speed dial) changed to Bing too, though I didn't update anything.

Huh. I assumed it was because I updated to the latest version. Strange.

[lesser_minion]

Microsoft recently updated some of their Internet Explorer toolbars so that they also work in Firefox.

Mozilla have a support article (http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Removing+the+Search+Helper+Extension+and+Bing+Bar) about how to fix the issue, but if you're using any IE toolbars, you will have to uninstall those as well.

In general, if you find your preferences have been tampered with without your permission, you need to figure out what was responsible and excise it with extreme prejudice before you can restore your original settings.


As for Opera, things aren't quite so insidious -- Opera made an agreement with Bing to include their search engine in the browser, and as part of that they included it as the default speed dial search. Changing it back is trivial.

Generally, browsers that aren't Firefox or Internet Explorer don't have this problem -- Chrome and Opera are favoured by the kind of user who responds to tampering by finding the offices of those responsible and razing them to the ground. This provides something of an incentive not to do so.