Tonight I came home to discover that whenever I looked at this site, it was wrapped in advertising. Yikes! I was relieved to discover that it was ‘only’ on my machine; I had unknowingly inherited a browser extension that turned Safari into a giant billboard. Panic gave way to annoyance.
The creator of this extension is called Yontoo. They suck. But you can be sure that I didn’t run a Yontoo installer recently. Something else I installed did me the favor of sliding that sucker onto my machine. Tonight I wrote Yontoo this message:
How can I find out how you [sic] software was installed in my browser? I certainly didn’t ask for it, but obviously at some point when I thought I was installing something else, I got your stuff too. I want to know who to yell at.
is there a way to get rid of it?
Should have mentioned that. It turned out to be very easy once I figured out the source of the problem (I ended up looking at the page source and looking for brand names I could search on.)
In safari and many other browsers, there’s an extensions manager that allows you to add stuff to your browser. It also allows you to disable and remove extensions that someone tricked you into installing. The exact mechanism will vary based on the browser, but search “uninstall [your browser] extensions” should get you what you need to know.
And next time something like that happens to me, I’ll check the extension manager first.
thanks!
When I disabled “smart toolbar” these annoying banner ads went away, and a very intrusive search “helper” went away. Yay. Since I had found culprit I went back and deleted it for good. Now the question is “how did it get there in the first place?” Was it a pasing fancy on my part? Or something more devious and unasked for?
Every once in a while I get some crapware that changes my default search and homepage to some search site that pretends it’s Google (it uses the same layout and styling, though a different logo and URL). It takes way too long to set things straight again. They should make crapware illegal, heh.
(Chrome recently announced a new feature to address this! Extensions that get installed to Chrome by third party programs will be disabled by default. Though that only helps Chrome users, maybe other browsers will follow suit!)