Losing my mind with Firefox changing my settings. Help, please!

[Phyrebrat]

Hi All,

I don't consider myself tech-ignorant at all but for the life of my I cannot work out what the hell is going on here, despite following advice online.

I'm on a Macbook Air running MacOS Mojave 10.14.5 and Firefox Quantum 68.0.2 (64-bit). In my Prefernces for Firefox I have Google set as the default search browser, but every few days it auto changes to defaut to Yahoo which I loathe. To change it I have to go to Preferences, search, and then manually delete 'browser default' from the options (even though browser default is Google, not Yahoo), so that it is forced to use Google again.

It's SOOOO annoying eve though it's a tiny thing, but it just represents another one of those incidences where technology that's meant to do OUR bidding, is instead trying to get us to conform to IT's desires (can you hear the rage in my tone?)

To help, here is a screenshot.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

Seriously.

pH

 

[Dave]

You must be using some other app, browser extension or program that is changing it to Yahoo. It could be something bundled as malware with something else, entirely different. Only someone with access to your Macbook would be able to find out what it is but my best guess would be a browser extension. In the screenshot above, click on extensions and themes. Check that everything there you really need and remove what you don't use. Alternatively, it may be some freeware software that you like using and don't want to remove. In that case, you can get antispyware software that have options that prevent settings like this being changed by other programs. The problem with those are that they slow down operations (bloatware) and if you aren't careful they can introduce more malware themselves. So, check the recommendations first for such freeware, or else buy something reputable like Norton. Also, when you do find and remove the cause, don't just send a program to the recycle bin but uninstall it fully. Sometimes, they can leave things behind in the registry that then become even harder to find and remove.

It could be worse; it could be changing it to Bing.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Thanks Deev. I have tried those steps previously but couldn’t find anything - also my laptop is not usd for anything that requires downloads beyond apple’s stuff so I’ve not added any. Might give it a deeper look this weekend.

This kind of **** really gives me anxiety about the future. (Eg I’ve now unsubscribed to Pinterest, Amazon Prime, and countless other ‘services’ over the past month or two but still get relentless marketing emails.)

pH

 

[J Riff]

A malware prog might find it, like malwarebytes or combo cleaner. I had this oncet, ended up searching for yahoo.com in the registry and managed to stop it. But Bing is worse. )