I mostly use Google Chrome these days, but still have Mozilla FireFox installed as a browser, which used to be my standard browser before I switched to Chrome.
Today I launched FireFox again and was surprised to see something called Skipity in its toolbar. Furthermore, when I tried to go to my browser custom start page (a page with my most useful links) it took me to the Skipity website. A Google search showed that Skipity comes as part of an add-on called “Download Youtube video 12.0”. I removed that add-on, restarted FireFox, opened the URL I previously had as the browser start page and went to “Tools > Options > General > Startup” to select that URL as the start page again.
Any software that changes the start page of the browser without your consent should be permanently banned from your computer!
You were right to ditch it!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/01/25/the-worlds-worst-privacy-policy/
Today I typed some search terms into the URL field in Firefox and it performed a Yahoo search, even though I had Google selected as my search engine of choice. I looked for a fix and found the recommendation to enter about:Config as the URL, then to edit the keyword.URL setting. To surprise I again found Skipity listed in there. I edited the setting and changed it to “http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=” which selects Google.