Google Chrome with webisawesome issue

Question

For the past 3 days I had this webisawesome takeover of my new tab page. It provides a search bar that when used goes nowhere. I'm not sure where it came from, but recently the New Tab app I've been using has been made redundant. How to deal with this?

Answer 1

Apparently webisawesome is malware. Thanks to MaQleod for comment below your question.

According to this blog post

Websearch.WebIsAwsome.info it’s technically not a virus, but it does exhibit plenty of malicious traits, such as rootkit capabilities to hook deep into the operating system, browser hijacking, and in general just interfering with the user experience. The industry generally refers to it as a “PUP,” or potentially unwanted program.

You can simply Task Manager>End Task in chrome, or equivalent in firefox. Then go to the extensions page and remove it.

If that doesn't work, then Open up your OS's task manager(Ctrl+Shift+Delete on Windows) and kill the appropriate process. In case you're not sure how to do that, you can follow the link to the post, and follow their method.

Answer 2

It might be a plugin/extension you are using that adds custom content to the web-page you are visiting. Go to Chrome's extension manager in the top-right menu and and see if you can see anything suspicious.

Chrome menu -> Tools -> Extensions

If you can't see anything suspicious: Try disabling one by one extension and refresh your site until (hopefully) it is gone.