HIJACKED SEARCH ENGINE FIX FOR FIREFOX - May 13th, 2011

Ever since I upgraded to FF 4, and even though my default search engine is set to Google, when I enter a search term in the URL location bar my search ends up being hijacked by Yahoo's search engine. Your result may be different, but if your searches are not being handled by your default search engine, here’s the fix that worked for me. 1. Type about:config in the Firefox URL location bar and press Enter 2. Type the word “keyword” (no double quotes) in the "Filter" text box and you will see an entry for keyword.URL. There’s a good chance that it's value will contain the culprit search engine’s URL. 3. Double-click on keyword.URL and change the value to: http://www.google.com/search?&q= That should fix the problem, until some other program changes it again. SOMOTO.COM I also had a recurring issue with pages redirecting to Somoto.com and no matter what I did, I couldn’t keep it from recurring. Even when I did a search for the keword Somoto in the Filter text box of about:config, and deleted or changed all the somoto result values, they kept on coming back. After trying a number of options that I found on line, here’s what worked. BTW, This process did not delete any of my stored passwords, but you might want to make a backup of all your preferences and values just to be on the safe side. (Although one of them probably creates all the Somoto values as well) You can create a backup by following the instructions at the end of this recipe. Killing Somoto... 1) First I made a backup of my bookmarks alone. (bookmarks>show all bookmarks>import and backup menu>backup) 2) Then I started Firefox in the Safe mode (Hold down the "shift" key while starting the program). 3) Then I reset all the options to their default values by checking all the boxes available and clicking on “make changes and restart” 4) After a restart, I imported my latest backup of my bookmarks, reset a few default values, and the problem was solved. BACKING UP YOUR PREFERENCES On the Help menu in the Firefox menu bar click on "Troubleshooting Information". This will take you to the "about:support" information page. (you can also visit this page by typing about:support into the Firefox address bar) Under "Application Basics", click on the button that reads, "Open Containing Folder" next to Profile Directory. Then either copy the entire ??????.default folder, or just the files that you think you'll need from this list: NOTE: If you use the entire folder, be sure to change the ?????? in the old folder name to exactly match the numbers that appear in the new default name or the new install of Firefox won’t work. bookmarks.html - Bookmarks. prefs.js - Current user preferences. user.js - User-added preferences (overrides prefs.js every startup). cookies.txt - Cookies. hostperm.1 - Cookies permissions, image permissions, and extension website install permissions list. signons.txt - Saved passwords. Requires the "key3.db" file to work. key3.db - Supplements password file. cert8.db - Needed for key3.db file.

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