Yahoo! Messenger messes up Firefox

This is for those who are using Firefox and Yahoo! Messenger but very much in love with Google Search.

One fine day you happily installed Yahoo! Messenger on your computer. Then you realized that your happiness was short lived when you discovered that Yahoo!, without asking for your permission, had changed your Firefox Location Bar and Default Search Engine. Now when you put in your keywords in the location bar, Yahoo! Search would be fired up instead of your beloved Google Search. You then looked all over Firefox and unfortunately, there was no way to remove it.

You can now live with it or you can do the following...

Changing the Location Bar search

1. Type about:config in the location bar aka address bar and press enter.


2. Type keyword.URL in Filter.


3. Double-click on the displayed line.


4. A box will pop up. Change the string value to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=


5. Or if you want to fire up the Lucky Search, use http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=

That's it for the Location Bar search. If you want it to search using something else, you can always modify the string value to your liking.

Changing the Default Search Engine

1. Type about:config in the location bar aka address bar and press enter.


2. Type browser.search.defaultenginename in Filter.


3. Double-click on the displayed line.


4. A box will pop up. Change the string value from Yahoo to Google.

Done.

You are now free of Yahoo!