What is wrong with my browser?

So much going on in that screenshot, so just some quick items to get started.

1) Remove every program that doesn’t identify the company it’s from in the control panel
2) Google the rest and see if they’re adware. They often call the program something like “video player” to make you think it’s all good. It’s not.
3) Remove that ask toolbar and honestly every other toolbar you don’t use a lot. They enable this stuff
4) Antivirus doesn’t always grab adware, try malwarebytes for a starting point

I don’t know if that will get everything, but once that’s done you can usually track down individual symptoms more clearly. I’d guess you have 5 or 6 programs that are affecting your browser right now.

1. I’m doing it right now. Apart from programs that I intentionally installed, every program of that kind is guarantee to be removed.
2. Many of the suspicious add-ons I saw were labeled “video viewer”, I have had all those removed.
3. That toolbar comes with Avira, namely Avira SearchFree toolbar, and it has the web protection tool, so I don’t know if I should delete it or not.
4. Thanks for the link. I’ll try it out.

Banish Avira ASAP. At least the toolbar part if the two are separate. Use MSE to scan for mal/adware.

And yeah, my mom gets bitten all the time with random install this to watch a video crap all the time. It is a huge pain in the ass.

Avira installs the Ask,com toolbar by default, but there’s a box you can uncheck to omit it. I always omitted it.

That most likely is the issue, but it never hurts to run a malware scan anyways.

This is the tutorial on removing extra toobars and it is for Mozilla exactly. And in case this is not a toolbar but malware, here is how you remove malware

@blaird When it comes to browsers, the difference between “toolbar” and “malware” is largely semantics. The only actual difference is that you know the toolbar is there; you don’t need to run a system scan to know it’s installed.

Any antivirus that installs a toolbar does not have your best interests at heart.

@Vincentt Normally I’d agree, but Avira has done pretty well in independent testing; well enough that I used it for years. Based on detection rate and ability to both block and remove viruses, it does better than many that you have to pay for.

@blaird Thanks for your response but actually I have already tried those without success. And I agree with @jerv that Avira toolbar is pretty good. It’s also the only way I can use the Avira web protection tool.

Anyway, welcome to Fluther, and I appreciate your help :)

And a note to everyone: The problem has been solved! I downloaded two more antivirus and anti-adware and had them scan my computer together with Avira. And guess what I found: a hundred and fucking 30 different kinds of viruses and other system errors! Everything is fine now.

My system uses Spybot S&D v1.6 (the only good, free one that has real-time protection instead of just on-demand scanning) as well as Avast! , in addition to regular runs of CCleaner to handle non-malware issues and UltraDefrag. No issues in many years!