monline

Sometimes when I start Firefox, I see an URL in the location bar, however my settings should tell to show a blank page on startup. The URL is something like http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=. I did search through all the files of the browser (btw. I'm using FF on Ubuntu Feisty) and found that the file /usr/share/firefox/chrome/en-US.jar contains a file locale/browser-region/region.properties which contains this:

So the above URL is for searches that Firefox does if you enter some text into the location bar that does not resolve to a valid (eg. non-existant domain) URI. But why does FF load sometimes such a search on startup? Eg. today I had this URL in the location bar with a search query of the text "tE5p3". The strange thing above all is that this URL was there, but FF did not show the contents of the page belonging to that URL (ie. the Google hits for the term "tE5p3"). If I manually search for this term, the first hit I get contains some unrecognizable binary data (it's at the address asp1.sbs.ohio-state.edu, but now the URL gives a HTTP 404 Not found ... however the Google cache still shows the old contents of that URL). Is it maybe possible that my Firefox profile got infected by some sort of Trojan (eg. some JavaScript) that tries to redirect my browser to a site that contains a browser exploit that should take over my PC? Anyway, this is quite strange.