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:
...but only on internal pages (those from our servers, not those on the "real" Internet...what?!?)
Adobe Reader
andAdobe Flash player
isn't the current version and is the reason you become infected with theWhitesmoke
malware. Use the security program of your choice to removeWhitesmoke
instead of removing a perfectly valid add-on.Conduit Radio Plugin
is likely malware if you didn't install the add-on yourself.