295880 - search box hijacked by outfit called creative commons, which directs all searches to its pages

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[David Quirk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Firefox/1.0.4

During the last week of May, I noticed that the search box in Firefox 1.0.2 did
not display the usual Google icon. Instead it displayed what turned out to be
the creative commons icon and directed all searches to its pages.

I access the net as a limited user under XP so that software cannot be installed.
When I realized that something was wrong, I logged in as administrator, ran
Spybot, fixed the problems, updated Spybot, ran it again, and it came up clean.
I ran it again in the limited user account and it came up clean.

I then uninstalled firefox, downloaded version 1.04, and installed it as
administrator. Started firefox, no problem, the Google search bar appeared every
time. Logged in as limited user and ran firefox. It came up clean the first
time, but on second use, creative commons was back in charge of the search box.

I searched creative commons directly with Google, bypassing the search box. It
comes up as a non-profit corporation involved with any number of benevolent
sounding projects. Nonetheless, these people have somehow hacked firefox to
install their search engine. I didn't invite them and I don't want them, but at
this point, I am stymied in my efforts to get rid of them.

First, you should know about this and second, please help me to lose these
people. Than you.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. start firefox


Actual Results:  
see above

Comment 1

[David Quirk]

May 29, 2005 - 11:43 a.m. EST

Gentlemen:
   I have egg on my face. Creative Commons had installed a plug-in under the
Firefox/searchplugins subdirectory. I deleted the files and things seem to be
back to normal.
   The question remains as to how they installed this plug-in to a user account
which presumably cannot install software. Microsoft's bugs are beyond anyone's
control, however.
    My apologies,

David Quirk 

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

If you click on the "G" in the search box you'll see the installed plugins.
Creative Commons is installed with the product, along with Google (the default),
Yahoo, Amazon, Dictionary.com, and eBay.

The fact that Creative Commons is present is not a problem. Default search
changing by itself is a problem if we can figure out why it's happening. It's
not Creative Common's fault. First, they're reputable folks, and second, search
plugins don't have that kind of ability.

If you type Ctrl-Downarrow or Ctrl-Uparrow in the search box you cycle between
search engines without bringing up the drop-down. Perhaps you accidentally type
that when you think the focus is somewhere else? Ctrl-K moves the focus to the
search box in case that's part of the pattern. Is there anywhere you normally go
where you Ctrl-downarrow three times? Three because that's what it would take to
get from Google to CC in the default ordering, and you seem to be consistently
landing on that one rather than Yahoo or Amazon or eBay. Now that you've
uninstalled CC see if you start switching to dictionary.com