Firefox Virus

Blue Scream of Death

My computer has had been kind of cranky for the last few months. I knew it had a virus, but I knew cleaning it out was going to be a major pain, and the problems I was having were just kind of the minor, annoying kind, not BSOD (Blue Scream Of Death), you have-to-reboot-every-five-minutes kind of annoying.

Malwarebytes Logo

But it's a new year, maybe I should make an effort to get rid of this pest. I started by running Malwarebytes to scan for virii. As expected, it found a bunch of vermin, but as soon as they were cleared out, they reappeared. So I contacted Malwarebytes and started this back and forth email dialog (16 messages over 48 hours) with one of their experts. We try this, and we try that. Some of it works, and some of it doesn't, but the biggest problem now is that my Firefox browser locks up at the drop of a hat.

Firefox Logo

Fine, let's just get rid of Firefox. They have joined the "let's issue a new version every two weeks" crowd, and I really don't want to have anything to do with that bunch. Often members of this crowd (Microsoft, Adobe, Ubuntu and I don't know who else) claim that these updates are to fix problems with their software, but just as often they change the way stuff works, or they just move things around for no good reason. I hate that shit. I know how the current version of the program works, I don't want to have to learn how to use it again. So out with Firefox and in with Chrome.

Chrome Logo

And what do you know? All the virii seem to have vanished.

P.S. Yes, I know BSOD means Blue Screen Of Death, but what do you hear when someone sees it?
P.P.S. The Chrome icon that shows up on html files in the directory listings of your computer is kind of bright and obnoxious compare to the old Firefox icon, but I suppose I will get used to it.

Update January 2021 replaced missing images and added captions.