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some websites e.g. facebook suddenly change into a page of search.softonic.com

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  • 1 has this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by Rene1944

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the website first comes up normally and then changes to a search.softonic.com search result page of a certain item. This happens not only with facebook but with some newspaper sites like www.telegraaf.nl, www.fd.nl etc. I have to go to internet explorer to see my facebook page, which I don't like being a long time firefox user.!

the website first comes up normally and then changes to a search.softonic.com search result page of a certain item. This happens not only with facebook but with some newspaper sites like www.telegraaf.nl, www.fd.nl etc. I have to go to internet explorer to see my facebook page, which I don't like being a long time firefox user.!

Chosen solution

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance).

  • Do not click the Reset button on the Safe mode start window or otherwise make changes.

Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
You need to scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

See also:

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Chosen Solution

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance).

  • Do not click the Reset button on the Safe mode start window or otherwise make changes.

Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
You need to scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

See also:

more options

Found it. Softonic was an extension I was not aware of. Removed and problem solved. Great!