Yahoo steals default search on Firefox [updated]
Posted: September 5th, 2007 | Author: vinnie | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
UPDATE September 10th, 2007. Well, Firefox has an obvious strong following, and only a few hours after posting this, somebody (Kev Needham) that works on the project reached out to me to try and recreate the error because they really don’t like ppl exploiting their browser.
So it seems i was wrong. Yahoo Messenger did not override my search, it was MegaUploader (which I installed at roughly the same time). We’ll all know how ass-u-m[e]-tions go… So apologoies to Yahoo. It seems that even after you uninstall megauploader, it leaves the yahoo search override with a search affiliate key as part of the URL.
Kudos to the Firefox team which not only answers support questions on various forums around the web, but actually surfs the blogosphere looking for distress signals!
Thanks to Kev Needham for bringing this to my attention.
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This is just a tip (and FYI) for anybody that installs yahoo messenger [megauploader]. Even though you may deselect the options of making yahoo your default search engine and installing the yahoo [megauploader] toolbar, it still hijacks your Firefox setting for when you mistype a domain in the url. By default, Firefox will do a Google "I’m Feeling Lucky Search" to take you directly to the first result on google for the invalid url.
So yahoo [megauploader] steals this convenient device and returns their crappy search results (which surprisingly enough, looks EXACTLY like google search results.)
To reset firefox to it’s default search url, follow these steps:
- Type "about:config" in the URL field, hit enter
- When a new window pops up, search for: "keyword.URL"
- Replace the yahoo value with "http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q="
Congrats, you’re done, more options and info on default url search behavior here.
Hey, just be lucky you’re not a Chinese dissident, because then they would steal your search bar AND send your identity to the police.
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-danny