firefox hijacked?

dcdbutler · 02-20-2006, 04:29 PM

This is a bit weird.
My homepage is google, not this:

http://www.arizona.edu/

but whenever I open firefox, it starts here. Then if I click on the home icon, it goes to google, which is actually my homepage.

Running firefox 1.5.0.1 on slackware.

Cheers

dcdbutler · 02-20-2006, 05:09 PM

I backed up the stuff I needed in my profile then uninstalled firefox and deleted any remaining files/directories/profiles i oculd find relating to firefox and did a fresh install. Still the same problem, it's opening up at http://www.arizona.edu/

I'm stumped.

pixellany · 02-20-2006, 05:12 PM

What happens if you:
set preferences to start with a blank page?

set your homepage to something else?

dcdbutler · 02-20-2006, 05:21 PM

It doesn't matter what i seem to do in terms of setting the homepage preferences, it always starts on that page. I've created new profiles and they're overtaken by arizona.edu also.

tvynr · 02-20-2006, 05:42 PM

This is a bit of an outlandish suggestion, but if it's your machine's fault, the URL "arizona.edu" has to be on it somewhere. Perhaps you could clear your Firefox history and cache and then try

Code:

find / -exec grep -il "arizona.edu" {} \;

to locate files in which the string "arizona.edu" appears?

gilead · 02-20-2006, 05:52 PM

If you start Firefox with /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.1/firefox in a terminal window do you get the same behaviour? I'm just wondering if the menu link to Firefox has been modified.

dcdbutler · 02-20-2006, 06:13 PM

Thanks for the help guys

Quote:

If you start Firefox with /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.1/firefox in a terminal window do you get the same behaviour? I'm just wondering if the menu link to Firefox has been modified.

This must be what happened......
The menu link opened up at the arizona webpage, but when I started firefox with /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.1/firefox it opened up ok.

I've just started using xfce4 and am getting used to the menus and stuff. For the command for firefox, i had "firefox %u" in my menu for some reason. I've changed this to /usr/bin/firefox and it seems to be behaving itself ok now. Is there a better fix, of do you think this should be ok?

Cheers,

gilead · 02-20-2006, 06:49 PM

That should be fine. The %u is a KDE menu thing that says it can take a single URL argument. Are you a student at arizona.edu? The reason I ask is that tvynr's point is valid - something has changed the arguments passed to the firefox binary.

On my systems, which firefox returns /usr/bin/firefox so you're starting Firefox with the correct code.

dive · 02-20-2006, 06:50 PM

firefox is in your path, so you can just put 'firefox' in the menu. That's pretty much how it should be. Don't know where the %u came from

dcdbutler · 02-20-2006, 07:08 PM

Hey, thanks

Quote:

Are you a student at arizona.edu?

heh heh, no, I'm not, that's what confused me most, I had absolutely no idea where it came from, until I saw this on the ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-111964.html

gilead · 02-20-2006, 08:13 PM

Wow - now that's obscure! And thanks for posting the link, I'm about to pass it around here, Murphy's law says this never happens just once or twice