What is Skipity and why is it in FireFox?

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!

2 thoughts on “What is Skipity and why is it in FireFox?

  1. 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.

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