Conduit Search was inadvertently installed and now my Firefox displays a Bing page rather than a 404 [closed]

Question

This was inadvertent on my part. I was installing a DivX upgrade and the "Install blah blah" checkbox (I only got a quick glance) was checked by default - on Mac OS, certain windows and application can steal my "focus" away from me so if I hit ENTER while I'm in, say TextWrangler, but the installer window steals my focus just before I hit ENTER and the "Install Conduit Search" is already checked, well, this add-on gets installed before I can stop it from happening! I hate that behavior on Mac OS passionately.

Now, I'm trying to remove it. Mostly because I hate the fact that Bing appears all over the place. I hate Bing, too.

Anyway, I followed instructions here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/713710 and here: http://community.conduit.com/Community/Forum/Community-Toolbar.aspx?threadid=35114 but about:config doesn't contain anything, nor does "Add-ons", Extension, or Plug-ins...nor does /Library/InputManager/

Right now, I have removed all traces of Bing and Conduit found in "Manage Search Engines" and anything in about:config, but a 404 page still redirects to the "Whoops! The page could not be found. Try giving it another chance below." and at the bottom of the page, it says "Why did I get this page?". When I click on "Why did I get this page?", it tells me because I installed "Community Toolbar", which I guess I did, but I see no signs of it what-so-ever. The Plugins and Extensions settings for my Firefox do not contain anything that I'm not familiar with and most certainly don't contain anything about Conduit or Community or even Toolbar for that matter. If I go to "View" > "Toolbars", the only thing listed there is "Navigation" and "Bookmarks". There is an "Add-on Bar" but when I enable/disable, it appears to only be for my 1Password App.

I am stumped. I like to keep my browsers lean and mean and not install any of this crap. I'm not sure why I chose to install DivX in the first place but that's another lesson for another day.

The goal at hand is to get rid of this Conduit/Bing crap. Conduit's customer service is pretty non-existent, as expected.

The only sign that it exists is when I go to a URL and get a 404 page, it takes me to search.conduit.com rather than just a 404 page. In about:config, there is a "alternate_error_page" key listed but its value is "blocked", meaning "about:blocked" is how you see why a page was blocked.

I don't know where else to turn. Please help!

Answer 1

I also needed to delete the file

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/browser/MACSearchTakeOver.js