My friend’s PC is infected with maleware. Firefox takes forever to load (if ever) normally but if I launch FF in its “safe mode”, opens immediately (a sure sign of a bad addon/plugin.)
But when I check, it shows no unusual addons installed.
Is there a utility that can identify & remove hidden addons/plugins? TIA
There is no such thing as a hidden add-on (apart from system add-ons which need to be signed with a special mozilla key that malware never ever should get its hands on).
If you do not trust the list in about:addons, you can cross-check about:support.
In general, malware extensions when discovered and reported to mozilla can be blocklisted, so they’re removed automatically. However, malware may try to break this mechanism, which has to be fixed outside of Firefox.
The classic advice of figuring out a bad extension is to use the “half-split” troubleshooting method, where you disable half of all extensions, and if that solves the issue the extension is in the other half, else it’s in the current half. Then you half that half and do the same etc.
Thanks for the reply.
I’ve had situations in the distant past where a malicious plug-in did not appear in the list of installed plugins and therefore was incredibly difficult to remove. I wasn’t sure whether or not that was still the case.
He has/had one “infected” Addon that disabling resolved. The addon itself was legit [“Tweepsmap”] and he got it off their official website, yet somehow down the line, it clearly became “infected” because disabling it made his problems go away. But the infection goes much deeper and the infected plugin keeps reappearing.
So I need a utility to detect & fully remove the infection and all its parts.
Then you should probably follow https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-caused-malware
As I said, this means there’s outside influence.