Symptom: every morning when I sit down and click on the Mozilla icon at the bottom (I am running a Win-7 machine) there is a second Mozilla window open and it contains an ad. Usually for a cheap I-phone, but sometimes something else. When I click on the x to close it, I am asked if I really want to leave this site. I click on yes and it goes away. Until the next morning. As far as I can tell, there is no other symptom of infection.
You probably have some adware or other minor malware on the computer. Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ is a good tool for getting rid of such annoyances.
What’s your home page? It’s possible that whoever it is has started selling pop-up advertising.
Google is my home page. But the thing is that it opens a separate copy of Mozilla, not just a new tab. I will try Ad-aware.
I put in ad-aware and now new tabs open in an ad-aware search which is NOT what I want. Until now, I got a display of my most frequently visited pages and this has disappeared. There doesn’t seem to be any way to disable this. I am not sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.
Sounds like a browser hijack. Sometimes these hijacks are difficult to remove. This has happened to me in the past as well. What I will do is try the standard anti-spyware/malware software to remove it. Occasionally this does not work. Or I will try to remove it manually.
My strategy revolves around googling the symptoms, as you have described in this thread, looking to actually name the adware hijack.
Then it’s a question of googling the name and following instructions of those who have passed before you. Anyway, that’s my methodology. If all else fails, I have backup images of my C: drive to fall back on.
The best thing I’ve found to remove difficult junkware is ComboFix. It’s not a pretty program but it works when other adware removers fail.
The detailed instructions will guide you through it. You can probably safely ignore most of the warnings except for the one that says “Windows 8.1 and Windows 2000 are NOT supported by ComboFix.”
I have Ad Aware (admittedly, an older version) on one of my computers and that doesn’t happen… Did Ad Aware install a search toolbar or change your homepage?
On Firefox you should easily be able to change the search engine (via the settings) back to Google/Bing/whatever is your preferred, and you should also be able to remove any toolbars that have been added via the Add/Remove Programs section in the control panel.
Or you could try IOBit’s Uninstaller program - that shows you any toolbars/addons you may have and can uninstall them for you.
With regards to your initial problem - best bet is to run a scan with an anti malware program and see what happens. If it still causes problems then uninstall and reinstall Firefox.
Open Internet Explorer. Same hacked behaviour? If so, just fixing Firefox ill not help.
Ad-aware has not blocked this pop-up. I guess it is not a pop-up since it opens a new Firefox browser window. Although I made Google my only search engine, Ad-aware still takes over every new tab. So I am worse off than before.