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bing search won't go away

  • 7 replies
  • 34 have this problem
  • 19 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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I recently downloaded PowerISO and it changed my search engine to Bing. It did not install any program or plugin that I can plainly see. When I go to control panel and "Uninstall or change programs" I don't see a Bing, nor do I see a plug-in or extension on Firefox. I was able to change my homepage back to Google, but now Firefox always searches through Bing whenever I open a new tab.

So, my main tab works fine, but all my tabs automatically search through Bing. How do I fix this?

I recently downloaded PowerISO and it changed my search engine to Bing. It did not install any program or plugin that I can plainly see. When I go to control panel and "Uninstall or change programs" I don't see a Bing, nor do I see a plug-in or extension on Firefox. I was able to change my homepage back to Google, but now Firefox always searches through Bing whenever I open a new tab. So, my main tab works fine, but all my tabs automatically search through Bing. How do I fix this?

All Replies (7)

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Your question posting got duplicated /questions/985203. Please wait for a response on that thread as this thread will be locked.

Thanks!

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I've locked the other (older) thread, so you can post a reply here.

You can check in "Windows Control Panel > Programs" for recently installed programs to see if anything from Conduit or any other suspicious software shows up.

Note that your System Details List shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize some prefs each time you start Firefox.

The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created it, so normally it wouldn't be there. you can check its content with a plain text editor if you didn't create this file yourself.

The user.js file is read each time you start Firefox and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.

You can delete a possible user.js file and numbered prefs-##.js files and rename (or delete) the prefs.js file to reset all prefs to the default value including prefs set via user.js

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Hello,

Apologies for the dupes, I didn't think my first one went through. I did not do it out of any impatience or bad intent. Thank you for locking the old one. I found Conduit was installed on my machine and uninstalled it, whenever I try searching through my address bar it still searches Bing when it originally would just go with Google.

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Also forgot to specify that I'm a bit confused on how to find the .js files.

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Hello,

The Reset Firefox feature can fix many issues by restoring Firefox to its factory default state while saving your essential information.
Note: This will cause you to lose any Extensions and some Preferences.

  • Open websites will not be saved in Firefox versions lower than 25.

To Reset Firefox do the following:

  1. Go to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.
  2. Click the "Reset Firefox" button.
  3. Firefox will close and reset. After Firefox is done, it will show a window with the information that is imported. Click Finish.
  4. Firefox will open with all factory defaults applied.

Further information can be found in the Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings article.

Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!

Thank you.

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As you've discovered, new tabs have a separate setting from your home page. It's hidden, and here's how to change it.

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtab.url preference and enter your preferred page:

  • Page thumbnails (default) => about:newtab
  • Blank tab => about:blank
  • Built-in Firefox home page => about:home
  • Any other page => full URL to the page

Press Ctrl+t to open a new tab and verify that it worked. Fixed?

Before checking this off as fixed, please note that your "More System Details" reveals a user.js file. Firefox reads this file at startup and uses it to override your settings from your previous session. This article describes how to track down and remove the file: How to fix preferences that won't save.

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You can check if you have suspicious extensions installed or extensions that you didn't install yourself.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance).

  • Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe Mode start window.