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I downloaded this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/firequery/ after reading this article: http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/firebug-extension-firequery-jquery-development/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SoftwareIsHard+%28Software+is+hard%29

...and either it or a bogus firefox installation (probably the latter) installed a bunch of junk that is taking over my browsing experience like kudzu - it adds ads to Stack Overflow and all kinds of popups and icons everywhere, etc. How can I get rid of it?

Some of it calls itself "Whitesmoke"

I'm not using firefox at the moment; all this is happening within Chrome. To install "firefox", I just binged "download firefox" and installed from there, but don't recall which link it was.

UPDATE

"about:addons" (chrome://addons) displays "this web page is not available"; "about:plugins" (chrome://plugins) displays 12 items, all of which look legit, although I'm not sure what "Conduit" is (Conduit Chrome Plugin (two versions), Conduit Radio Plugin, Conduit Chrome Approve TB Plugin).

Others are:

Adobe Flash Player
Chrome Remote Desktop Viewer
Native Client
Chrome PDF Viewer
Adobe REader
Google Update
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Silverlight

UPDATE 2

After looking in Control Panel | Apps, I saw several installed today:

"24X7 Help" from Crawler LLC
"Fast Free Converter"
"File Opener Pro"
"PC Fix Speed 1.2.0.24"
"Software Version Updater"
"Whitesmoke New Toolbar"
"Search [or someting] from Conduit"

So I uninstalled all of those, and as one mentioned "conduit" I disabled those from the plugins, too...rebooted, and all seems back to "normal"; that's a relief, but what a pain/waste of time!

UPDATE 2

Even after uninstalling and disabling all of that, and rebooting, the whiteSmoke toolbar has come back again:

enter image description here

...but only on internal pages (those from our servers, not those on the "real" Internet...what?!?)

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    A quick was would be to delete your Firefox profile. The second way would be to remove the extension from your Firefox profile. The third way would be to disable the add-on within Firefox. Of course I should point the add-on isn't the cause of your problems. I would just run your normal security software and remove the malicious infection on your computer which was NOT CAUSED by FireQuery. The project has existed for nearly 4 years and the author for 8 years.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 25, 2013 at 15:47
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    I would place money on the fact your Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash player isn't the current version and is the reason you become infected with the Whitesmoke malware. Use the security program of your choice to remove Whitesmoke instead of removing a perfectly valid add-on.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 25, 2013 at 16:07
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    Conduit Radio Plugin is likely malware if you didn't install the add-on yourself.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 25, 2013 at 16:12

2 Answers 2

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Go to the Add-ons page(copy-paste this into address bar, it won't let me display it as a link: about:addons), find it there and click Remove.

If you can't find anything there, check about:plugins for unwanted content.

Adding that most probably FQ isn't the cause, but check the above 2 pages anyway, too see is there something you don't recall installing.

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Go to the "Add-ons" menu in Firefox and you can uninstall any plugins or extensions from there. If you can't get into the Add-ons menu due to a plugin, try starting Firefox in Safe Mode.

You also might check your Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features and remove anything that looks like it could be adware or anything you don't use.

Agree with @Ramhound in that it's not this plugin causing issue but something else you may have accidentally installed.

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