This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Getting searching.com not start page that is set in options.

more options

I went to about:config and cleared it in the newtaburl with reset and that gave me a blank page but still got the searching.com page at startup even though the right page was in about:config and in options. At the same time webpages started having words that belonged there showing up as double underlined links which had popup ads when he cursor went over them.

This happens in both firefox and nightly. I have uninstalled and reinstalled both of them twice to no avail.

I appreciate any help that you can provide. I am win 8.1 ff is the latest version available and nightly is 38.0a1.

I tried to upload the about:config info but it saves as a xul file which give an error.

I went to about:config and cleared it in the newtaburl with reset and that gave me a blank page but still got the searching.com page at startup even though the right page was in about:config and in options. At the same time webpages started having words that belonged there showing up as double underlined links which had popup ads when he cursor went over them. This happens in both firefox and nightly. I have uninstalled and reinstalled both of them twice to no avail. I appreciate any help that you can provide. I am win 8.1 ff is the latest version available and nightly is 38.0a1. I tried to upload the about:config info but it saves as a xul file which give an error.

Asịsa ahọpụtara

hi, this sounds like an issue with adware that is present on your system. please perform all these steps:

  1. reset firefox (this will keep your bookmarks and passwords)
  2. afterwards go to the firefox menu ≡ > addons > extensions and in case there are still extensions listed there, disable them.
  3. finally run a full scan of your system with different security tools like the free version of malwarebytes and adwcleaner to make sure that adware isn't present in other places of your system as well.

Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware

Gụọ azịza a na nghọta 👍 2

All Replies (2)

more options

Asịsa Ahọpụtara

hi, this sounds like an issue with adware that is present on your system. please perform all these steps:

  1. reset firefox (this will keep your bookmarks and passwords)
  2. afterwards go to the firefox menu ≡ > addons > extensions and in case there are still extensions listed there, disable them.
  3. finally run a full scan of your system with different security tools like the free version of malwarebytes and adwcleaner to make sure that adware isn't present in other places of your system as well.

Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware

more options

I got rid of searching.com by setting my start/new tab page to blank for a while and then set it back to the desired page and it worked. I believe that the searching.com got caught in restoring tabs on restarting. The link insertions seemed to stop when I restarted with all add ons disabled.

Thank you for your helpful and prompt assistance.