Problem with Firefox Plugins

[nukecad]

3 hours ago, Léon said:

Hello Imacri,

The only thing that really interests me in this case is:

I don’t like (to say it mildly) Bing, bol.com, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Google, Marktplaats and all their colleagues, so I don’t want them to be enabled in Firefox.

This is exactly what we are saying; Firefox is enabling these search engines by default - and you can't stop it doing that.

If Firefox is closed then you can 'disable' them with CCleaner, but then Firefox just re-enables them again.

Nobody but Firefox/Mozilla can change that behaviour.
(I've searched online but have yet to find anyone who has managed to totally disable them permanently).

It's not something that CCleaner can change, Firefox would have to stop enabling/re-enabling them by default.

[Léon]

Yes, Mr. Nukecad,

It would be interesting to know where exactly in Firefox, CCleaner finds the information about these browser plug-ins.

[lmacri]

5 hours ago, Léon said:

The only thing that really interests me in this case is: I don’t like (to say it mildly) Bing, bol.com, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Google, Marktplaats and all their colleagues, so I don’t want them to be enabled in Firefox.

Hi Léon:

I have no problem disabling (hiding) or removing my one-click search engines from the list of available search engines in Firefox 81.0 at Tools | Options | Search | One-Click Search Engines as instructed in the Firefox tutorial Firefox support article Add or Remove a Search Engine in Firefox - see my 24-Sep-2020 reply <here>.  The image below shows I've disabled / hidden the Amazon and eBay search engines so they don't appear when I search from my Firefox address or search bar (note that the check mark next to these search engines has been toggled off), and if I wanted to remove a search engine like DuckDuckGo from that list I could highlight the search engine and click the "Remove" button. Nukecad is correct that "removing" those search engines isn't permanent since you can click the "Restore Default Search Engines" button to reset that list back to its default settings, but the search engines shouldn't spontaneously re-enable themselves as long as you configure your settings from within Firefox.  As far as I can tell the one-click search engine settings are working in Firefox exactly as they were designed to do.

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Problems only occur if you try and manage your Firefox one-click search engines from the CCleaner add-on manager at Tools | Browser Plugins | Firefox.  As I showed in my 24-Sep-2020  images <here>, my Amazon and eBay search engines are correctly disabled (hidden) in my Firefox address and search bars but CCleaner always incorrectly reports these disabled search engines are enabled (Enabled = Yes).

And as others have reported in this thread, if you disable a Firefox one-click search engine like Wikipedia from the CCleaner add-on manager at Tools | Browser Plugins | Firefox (i.e., you highlight the Wikipedia search engine and click the Disable button to change the status to Enabled = No) the search engine is not actually disabled in Firefox...

... and the next time you open CCleaner the status will have reverted from disabled (Enabled = No) back to enabled (Enabled = Yes).

 

I don't think the issue is that the Firefox one-click search engines are spontaneously re-enabling themselves after being disabled in CCleaner.  I simply can't see any evidence that they were ever disabled by CCleaner in the first place.
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64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.1016 * Firefox 81.0 * CCleaner Free Portable v5.72.7994

[lmacri]

23 hours ago, lmacri said:

...At one point my TrafficLight extension was enabled in Firefox at Tools | Add-ons | Extensions and the icon in the browser toolbar was visible but CCleaner (Tools | Browser Plugins | Firefox) showed the extension was disabled (Enabled = No) and threw an "access denied" error (sorry, I can't recall the wording of the full error message) when I clicked the Enable button....

Just an FYI for the Avast / Piriform employees that I managed to capture an image of the CCleaner error message today when I was testing with my Firefox one-click search engine settings in the CCleaner add-on manager at Tools | Browser Plugins.

At the time this happened, I had just clicked the Disable button to change the status of my Wikipedia one-click search engine in Firefox to Enabled = No as shown below (which didn't actually disable the search engine in Firefox as I demonstrated <here>), and when I highlighted the Wikipedia search engine again and clicked the Enable button just see if the status would change back to Enabled = Yes the CCleaner add-on manager threw the above error.

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64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.1016 * Firefox 81.0 * CCleaner Free Portable v5.72.7994

[nukecad]

2 hours ago, Léon said:

Yes, Mr. Nukecad,

It would be interesting to know where exactly in Firefox, CCleaner finds the information about these browser plug-ins.

Apparently Firefox also used to regard these search engines as extensions/plug-ins and they could be removed from the Add-ons manager.

You can't do that for the search engines anymore, and just when Firefox stopped letting you do that I don't know.

PS. The talk about BitDefender here is confusing things; BitDefender is not a search engine and not a defualt in Forefox.

[Léon]

The best option would certainly be:

If we don’t want these search engines, allow us to remove them for good. Because we can‘t do this, this discussion was born.

Imacri could well be right: they can’t be completely disabled at all, not even temporarily.

We need to find a way to live with them.

[nukecad]

9 minutes ago, Léon said:

We need to find a way to live with them.

Easy, just untick them in Firefox Settings/Options and the Firefox searchbox will only use google.

Or:

Don't use the Firefox searchbox at all and set your Firefox homepage to google or whatever search you do want to use. (PS. 'New Tab Homepage' is a useful Firefox add-on if you do that).

And (at least for now) don't bother disabling them with CCleaner, because Firefox will simply re-enable them again.

I guess that mozilla are somehow making money by having them enabled by default?

[Léon]

When I saw the search engines for the first time, my wish was to never see them again. Not even in CCleaner.

The same as those annoying Windows 10 components like Edge or Defender.

Why can‘t we choose to get rid of them for ever?

[Andavari]

You'd probably have to use some clone of Firefox that another team develops to get what you want (as an example I use SRWare Iron instead of Google Chrome). Search engines are probably big money for web browsers.

[Léon]

Right: next to Firefox SRWare Iron is the browser for me too.

For a long time I was on Waterfox, but it went down the hill.

[lmacri]

On 29/09/2020 at 10:49, nukecad said:

Apparently Firefox also used to regard these search engines as extensions/plug-ins and they could be removed from the Add-ons manager.  You can't do that for the search engines anymore, and just when Firefox stopped letting you do that I don't know.... just untick them in Firefox Settings/Options and the Firefox searchbox will only use google.

Hi nukecad:

I've been using Firefox as my default browser since Firefox 3.6 was released in Jan 2011 and don't recall seeing the one-click search engines display in the add-on manager as an extension or plug-in at Tools | Add-ons, but I might be wrong about that.  Are you sure you aren't thinking of browser toolbars like DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Amazon Assistant, etc. that are more like the "traditional" browser add-ons that can be downloaded and installed from the Mozilla AMO store at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/?  These toolbars sometimes come bundled inside free software installers as PUPs (potentially unwanted programs) and will appear in the add-on manager as an extension.

5 hours ago, Léon said:

...If we don’t want these search engines, allow us to remove them for good. Because we can‘t do this, this discussion was born.  Imacri could well be right: they can’t be completely disabled at all, not even temporarily....

Hi Léon:

Instead of unchecking your one-click search engines at Tools | Options | Search | One-Click Search Engines to disable (hide) them, have you tried my suggestion <here> to use the Remove button to remove them?  For example, if I want to remove the Bing search engine from my list of available search engines, I can highlight Bing and click Remove...

... and Bing disappears from the list of available search engines as well as the address and search bars.  As I noted before, if you accidentally delete the wrong "default" search engine or you decide that you'd like to restore it you can add it back to the list by clicking the "Restore Default Search Engines" button, but if you delete a custom search engine (e.g., youtube.com) that isn't on your list of "default" search engines that custom search engine cannot be restored quickly using this "Restore Default Search Engines" shortcut and you will have to add it back manually again.

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64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.1016 * Firefox 81.0 * CCleaner Free Portable v5.72.7994

[nukecad]

The point remains that these default search engines are not doing anything at all unless they are ticked and you use the Firefox searchbox.

They are not loading, taking up memory, or doing anything else, unless/until you call them from the Firefox searchbox.

If you don't want to see them then hide (remove) them from the One-Click search engines and forget them.
(Or take the Firefox searchbox off your toolbar altogether).

[Léon]

Hello Imacri,

Removing the search engines in Firefox itself was the very first thing I did (Google included, of course: use Startpage or Qwant).

Finding them back in CCleaner later was a rather unpleasant surprise.

That made it so difficult to forget about them, Mr. Nukecad.

That’s why we are still talking about them today.

[lmacri]

On 24/09/2020 at 03:07, GeorgeNelis said:

...I am having an issue with the combination CCleaner (CC) and Firefox (FF), both on the latest release (V5.72, 81.0)

Within FF i have deleted several search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo and within CC i have disabled their extensions using 'Tools','Bowser plugins'.

After restarting FF and starting CC, the search engines don't show in FF but do show re-enabled in CC....

Could one of the Avast / Piriform employees please provide a status update and let us know if they've been able to reproduce the issue where enabling/disabling/removal of Firefox plugins from within CCleaner at Tools | Browser Plugins | Firefox does not correctly reflect the actual status of browser plugins in Firefox v81.x?  My testing indicates the issues occurs with the built-in one-click search engines (Tools | Options | Search | One-Click Search Engines) as well as browser extensions downloaded from the Mozilla AMO at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ (Tools | Add-ons | Extensions) .

Avast / Piriform ignored early warnings from users that CCleaner v5.68 was wiping custom settings in Firefox extensions in Firefox v79 and higher after Mozilla made changes to the storage.sync area for extension data storage - see cccirc's 01-Jul-2020 warning in Problem with Firefox 79 [fixed in v5.70] as well as the 09-Jul-2020 Mozilla blog Changes to Storage.sync in Firefox 79, which were both posted well before the buggy CCleaner v5.69 was released on 21-Jul-2020 and almost a full month before the stable release of Firefox 79 was officially released on 28-Jul-2020.  Right now my confidence in CCleaner's ability to safely manage my Firefox browser (as well as Avast / Piriform's  entire quality assurance testing program) is at an all-time low, so I would appreciate if Avast / Piriform could tell us if they are investigating whether this new issue with enabling/disabling/removal of Firefox plugins is caused by another bug in CCleaner.
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64-bit Win 10 Pro v1909 build 18363.1082 * Firefox 81.0.2 * Windows Defender 4.18.2009.7 * Cleaner Free Portable 5.72.7994
Dell Inspiron 15 5584, Intel i5-8265U@1.60/1.80 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB NVMe SSD, Intel UHD Graphics 620