Browsers & Accounts · Extensions: Helpful or Harmful · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: Grandma Ruth's Crowded Browser

Help Grandma clean out 14 extensions and win back her search engine.

Fourteen Helpers and a Strange Search

Grandma Ruth calls you over. Her browser feels slow, ads pop up everywhere, and when she searches, the results come from a site called "QuickFind Search" that she has never heard of.

You open her extensions page. There are 14 extensions. She recognizes only three: a large-text reader her library recommended, a password manager from a company she pays, and an ad blocker you installed for her last year.

The other eleven include four coupon finders, two "video downloaders", a weather tool, a few toolbars and one called "Search Protect". Several of them ask to read and change all her data on all websites.

Grandma is worried she broke something. You tell her she didn't. This happens to lots of people, and it can be fixed.

Before removing anything, you want to decide where to start.

Who Is in Charge Here

You open the browser menu. At the bottom it says Managed by your organization. Grandma is retired and has never used this computer for work.

The "Search Protect" extension has a greyed out Remove button. Next to it you see a small building icon.

You type the management address into the address bar. It lists a rule that forces QuickFind Search as the search engine, and another that installs Search Protect.

In her installed apps, you also find a free program called "PDF Magic Free". She downloaded it last month to open a letter.

Cleaning It Out

You uninstall "PDF Magic Free" from Windows Settings and run a full scan with Windows Security. The scan finds and removes the unwanted software. After a restart, the Managed by your organization message is gone, and Search Protect can now be removed.

You remove the eleven extensions she didn't recognize. But her search engine still says QuickFind Search, and her home page is a page full of ads.

There is one browser feature that puts the search engine, home page and startup tabs back to how they were when the browser was new. It keeps her bookmarks and saved passwords.

A Lean Browser for Grandma

The reset worked. Her searches look normal again, and the pop-up ads are gone. You turn her three trusted extensions back on.

The large-text reader only needs to work when she is reading articles. The password manager and ad blocker come from companies she knows, in the official store.

Grandma asks how to keep this from happening again. She often sees websites that say she needs to add something to watch a video or open a file.