I wondered whether you have the Ask Toolbar, and maybe that is causing this problem, but the Ask Toolbar is often noticeable from the user agent string.

This could be a malware problem, or just some forgotten software that you installed.

See

• Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware

Disco! that has worked - had the ask toolbar insrtalled as an extension - although can't remember ever having installed it...

...however, I've now removbed this and it has solved the problem - many thanks!

Glad to have been of help.

Note to self for future reference
Appears Ask toolbar may still cause problems, but now may not always change the user agent string.

@John99:

Extensions can't change the user agent easily anymore. The only pref that still works is general.useragent.override to override the full user agent. Adding signatures like the Ask.com toolbar did are no longer possible in Firefox 4.

Bug 581008 - Remove support for appending arbitrary data to the User Agent string

@Cor-el

Thanks for the explanation.

I have no added tool bars. However I went back to 3.6 that allows my Norton. John99 have me a url and that will open for a fraction of a second and once again plomedia and other search engines take over. Malware and other applications have cleared my pc several times as well as Norton. Something came with the new 4 download and I sure wish I could extract. Please keep me posted.

Malware certainly should not come with any Firefox 4 download. I did comment in your other post, but I have no other information about the plomedia problem.

Your other post is https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/806178#answer-160979

Incidentally I would have thought Norton should prevent malware problems, have you tried asking on their forums about plomedia. (If you get an answer it is probably best to use your other thread)

Yeah how do you get rid of ask.com from Firefox

It seems that ask.com has joined the Mozilla Firefox partner program which has added ask Jeeves into the latest version of Firefox. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/partnerships.html

I found some files on my computer which were from ask.com referring to co-branding, but even though i deleted these files from my computer it is still in my browser.

There was no notification of this during the last Firefox update, so unless i can get rid of it, it will be time to change browsers.

Nope - I can't find the ask toolbar anywhere in extensions or add-ons - but every time I put something in the google search bar, it replies in ask jeeves - and ask jeeves is BLOODY TERRIBLE. It knows NOTHING.

I have to search for google first and then search when it comes up.

@jase0421
You would have done better starting another thread. The answer is probably to do a clean install of an ordinary Firefox.

@boulterscanary
Again better to ask in a separate thread. You may have some other software changing your preferences. You should also have a search bar that includes Google as a search choice, and by default uses Google.

• see What to do when searches take you to the wrong search website