Smart Ad Block is blocking about:addons
An addon I downloaded added Smart Ad Block. It's been spontaneously redirecting Google to Bing and about:addons redirects to about:blank. The addons list will not appear so I can't remove any addons or extensions. I previously thought that Microsoft Co-Pilot was redirecting me. But I looked at the "Back" list. The redirect showed "search.smartadblock.net".
All Replies (4)
What was the addon you downloaded that added Smart Adblock? Is it the same as this SmartAdblock?
Try disabling your extensions to find which one is responsible.
I found a separate extensions thing, otherwise your suggestion wouldn't have solved it.
Remember what I wrote about the addons list not showing up.
about:addons, the Add-ons Manager, was blanked out by SmartAdBlock. They wanted to prevent anyone from removing it by the usual methods. about:addons brought up about:blank instead. But I found a separate button on the menu bar for extensions only that let me remove SmartAdBlock. That had a much shorter list than about:addons. After removing SmartAdBlock there is now only one dead extension there.
Modified
Extensions should not be able to intercept about:addons being loaded in the address bar. Are you sure the SmartAdblock extension is responsible? Do you see the same problem if you remove it and install SmartAdblock from addons.mozilla.org?
Note that you can always start Firefox in troubleshoot mode to remove such an extension.