Installed the AVG virusscanner and security software on my parents computer, and it’s sorta working OK. Except I neither like nor need the AVG Safe Search option that is apparently enabled by default. What this does is ‘scan’ your Google results for possibly unsafe websites. Don’t know whether it works or not and I don’t care. I didn’t ask for this crap and it’s messing with my search results, so I want to disable it.
And that’s when things become tricky. First of all, I can’t remove the extension in Firefox. This is all the more strange since I also noticed Firefox automatically disabled the extension for being incompatible with Firefox versions 11 and greater. But weirdly that doesn’t seem to stop AVG at all, since all my searches still redirected me to their stupid Safe Search page. So I dug a little deeper.
And then I found the cure. What you need to do is open AVG and disable the Safe Search option. Then you also need to enter ‘about:config‘ in the address bar of Firefox, look for the line with something like ‘AVG Safe Search‘ in it, and change it to ‘Google‘. Restart Firefox (just for good measure) and you should be all set!
So now my address bar searches finally work normally again, but if anyone can recommend an alternative good free antivirus program (though that does sound like a contradiction in terms), then please drop me a line in the comments. 😉
