889060 - Problem with "Conduit"

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Francis Spinoy]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

Introduce a querry directly in the top left window (as in Safari, which I use also)


Actual results:

Immediately, I was transferred to a "Conduit" search page containing various links. 
I do not understand how this is possible, because (this is the history of this case) :
1. "Conduit Search" was inserted in my two browsers "FireFox" and "Safari", when I was not careful enough to untag a "tag box" in a querry to download a Adobe application.
2. It started to pest me. I made a search about this "Conduit search", which appears to be some king of israelian commercial spyware. I could easily eradicate it from "Safari", but not from "FireFox".
3. I then eradicated all "Conduit" occurences from my Mac. But it was still there as described above.
4. To remove it, I downloaded a fresh FireFox...but it was still there !
5. Then I baught "Little Snith" and stopped a "Conduit" querry to open a chanel. But the "Conduit" is still there.

Even if this "Conduit" only appears once in a while, this really infuriates me. Who are those people, who impose their unwanted program to the users ?
I WANT TO ERADICATED THIS CONDUIT FOR GOOD !

Can you please help ?



Expected results:

This top left window is not supposed to get an enquiry using key word, but an url (a http://www.something.com). If I use it wrongly as a key words search window, a message saying "error" or "not such site exists" or "please use the left window" should appears. AN NOT THIS "CONDUIT" THING !

Hope this is clear. I will read your answer with the upmost interest, as I am certainly not the only one complaing about this (even bearing in mind that most users are lazy...)

Regards  Francis Spinoy

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Hi Francis,

We're really sorry to hear about this. In fact, we know about these kinds of problems, and in one of the upcoming versions of Firefox (23, now in beta), this problem should not happen anymore.

In the meantime, you should be able to uninstall the Conduit software using Tools > Add-ons (if you're using Firefox in French: Outils > Modules complémentaires). You probably have to restart Firefox for it to work.

If that doesn't work, here's a help page in French that hopefully helps you fix this:

https://support.mozilla.org/fr/kb/que-faire-lorsque-recherches-amenent-mauvais-site?esab=a&s=keyword.url&r=0&as=s#w_seules-les-recherches-de-la-barre-dadresse-sont-affectaees

(if your browser is in English, you can switch the language of the page at the top)

We know these steps are a little difficult - we'll be making it harder for you to have this problem really soon! - so just let us know if you need more help.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Another page that might be helpful is this one:

https://support.mozilla.org/fr/kb/supprimer-barre-outils-pirate-recherches-accueil

And if all else fails, you could try:

https://support.mozilla.org/fr/kb/reinitialiser-firefox-corriger-facilement-problemes

Hope that helps; let us know how it goes.

Comment 4

[Tiziana Sellitto [:tiziana]]

Attachment: Image from the reporter of Conduit search page

Comment 5

[Liz Henry (:lizzard)]

Francis, did you have any luck dealing with this? If so I'd like to close the bug.

Comment 6

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

We are tracking conduit policy issues at bug 837852.

Comment 7

[Francis Spinoy]

I,

Sorry not to answer, I have beeny busy

A few days ago, I asked a friend who is a Mac software specialist to help
He noticed that the "conduit" left problem was coming from an Avast conduit proxy (yes, Avast, the antivirus well known software). He told me that as a Mac user, I did not need Avast (or any antivirus) at all. As far as I knew, viruses did not affect Mac OSX (oppositely to what some PC users and companies would say).
I agreed with that advice (however somehow reluctantly). Avast was therefore cleanly whidrawned from my computer, using "Clean My Mac 2".

After this, the "conduit" problem disappeared completeley.
I hope that that was the right decision. It looks that way, but I am not myself a specialist enough to judge of that.

Just now, I tried to reproduce it and could'nt.

I also followed the advice given earlier by you, and could not find any trace of "conduit" anymore.

Anyway, I noticed also that my Firefox is now in version 23 (in version beta when Gijs sent me a reply in july), which might help as well.


I wish to thank you for your help. Hoping that such problems will not happen again.

Regards,

Francis

Comment 8

[Liz Henry (:lizzard)]

Francis, Great, I'm glad you were able to fix it! Thanks for the report!