Hello joe.bellon,

I assume that you never installed this add-on (which was last updated ten years ago) :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-scholar-10310/

But you're probably dealing with this hijacker, that changes your settings :

https://www.precisesecurity.com/hijacker/how-to-remove-googlescholar-co

Would you please do this :

Go to the Firefox menu (≡) => Options => Add-ons => Extensions and remove anything that looks unfamiliar or suspicious.

Next step is to run malwarescans - further information can be found in this article :

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-caused-malware?cache=no

Run most or all of the listed malware scanners. They all work differently - what one program doesn't pick up, the other might.

Especially for Mac : https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac/

Any luck ?

Hi McCoy, and thanks for the ideas. I have had MalwareBytes installed for quite a while. I went through all the search ideas for locating the offending hijacker and couldn't find it. Any other ideas?

joe.bellon said

Any other ideas?

Two questions, actually :

In that second link I posted (about the hijacker), did you scroll down to the section "Manually Remove Googlescholar.co from Mac" ?

And second question : Did you run all malware scans that are listed in the "troubleshoot" article ?

I was hoping you'd find the culprit in Preferences => Add-ons => Extensions, though ....... bummer !

So, the malware scans didn't help and I went through the steps to manually removed the hijacker file (it wasn't there). However, as I looked back through one of the links you provided, it offered me a "refresh Firefox" option, and that worked like a charm. Yay! Thanks so much.

I'm glad you got things back to normal - well done !