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PLEASE STOP CHANGING MY DEFAULT SEARCH ENGINE TO YAHOO! I'm going to delete Firefox if it happens again. Respect our settings.

  • 3 replies
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  • 14 views
  • Last reply by philipp

lockon
lockon
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This has happened at least twice now - I start firefox or it tells me there is an update. I let it do its thing and then search for something and the result comes back in Yahoo... 90% of the time the Yahoo results are preceded with spam links (paid advertisers) and I can't find what I actually need without scrolling way down in the results (Yahoo search is almost as bad as ASK).

I could care less what Mozilla's deal with Yahoo is, but stop SLAMMING my search engine choice - in any other industry that would be considered fraud - i.e. changing a service without asking.

I fear Mozilla has entered a death spiral and it may be time to take another look at Chrome...

This has happened at least twice now - I start firefox or it tells me there is an update. I let it do its thing and then search for something and the result comes back in Yahoo... 90% of the time the Yahoo results are preceded with spam links (paid advertisers) and I can't find what I actually need without scrolling way down in the results (Yahoo search is almost as bad as ASK). I could care less what Mozilla's deal with Yahoo is, but stop SLAMMING my search engine choice - in any other industry that would be considered fraud - i.e. changing a service without asking. I fear Mozilla has entered a death spiral and it may be time to take another look at Chrome...

All Replies (3)

philipp
philipp
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hello, this sounds like a problem possibly caused by adware on your pc - mozilla does respect your settings and you can set any engine of your choosing as default search provider.

  1. please go to the firefox menu ≡ > addons > extensions & remove any suspicious entries (toolbars, things that you have not installed intentionally, don't know what purpose they serve, etc).
  2. also go to the windows control panel / programs and remove all toolbars or potentially unwanted software from there.
  3. finally, run a full scan of your system with different security tools like the free version of malwarebytes & adwcleaner, which are specialised in adware and browser hijackers.

Remove a toolbar that has taken over your Firefox search or home page Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware

lockon
lockon Question owner
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Thanks, but I'm an IT professional and do this everyday - my PC and browser are clean. This issue is due to the deal Mozilla made with Yahoo... as I said, that's all fine but for them to slam my search preference is unethical. BTW, several of my clients made comments to me like "I came in today and noticed that my search changed from xyz to Yahoo"...

philipp
philipp
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this might happen once after the update to firefox 34 if you haven't customized the priorly preset engine (google), it will be replaced with the new preset one (yahoo): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and-innovation-on-the-web/

you are of course free to change the default search engine to anything of your liking: Search bar - add, change and manage search engines on Firefox

from your initial question it sounded like this wouldn't be working and yahoo is always coming back - if this is the case, this is not caused by mozilla but by external (possibly unwanted) interference, refert to my prior post.