IE replaced by Chrome w/o my permision, weird behavior

longlifexs

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Nov 14, 2012
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Hi,

I very strange thing just happened to me. I'm exclusively using IE 11 on my Surface Pro 3. Suddenly (without ANY action or permission on my part) a Chome icon appeared on the desktop. At the same time, an additional Internet Explorer icon got pinned to the taskbar next to the one I already had there. When I clicked one of the icons, a DOS-like window opened and closed. Afterwards, whenever I clicked either of the IE icons, Chrome would open. In Programs and Settings, Chome browser was shown, showing today as the installation date. I immediatelly unistalled it.

After that, when clicking the pinned IE icon, it said something along the lines of "chrome.exe (not sure about the exact name of the .exe it mentioned) was uninstalled, would you like to remove the shortcut?". The same thing happened when clicking the IE app on the start screen - eventually, I removed both of the pinned IE icons in desktop and the one on the start screen. After that, I was only able to launch the desktop IE by searching for iexplore.exe and then pinning it to the taskbar. However, I can't launch the IE app (tablet version), because searching for it doesn't show any results. The only way is to right click a tab in desktop IE and click "Open in Immersive Browser" - but even then I get weird behavior: normally, when you open the right charm bar and click settings, the app name and its producer's name is displayed, but a blank space is there instead of the app name, only showing "by Microsoft". Also, the app doesn't show in the multi-task view (left charm), but I can cycle to it swiping from the left edge of the screen.

So I have 3 questions: how could something like this happen, how to prevent it in the future and how to pin the IE app back to the start screen?

Many thanks!

PS: I didn't install anything when the Chrome icon appeared, so it couldn't have come bundled with some other program.
PPS: I am running regularly updated MS Security Essentials. After the incident, I also installed AdAware and ran a full scan with no results.

Mike
 

Jazmac

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Sounds like you may have installed a new program but did not select custom install. At which time the goog did its thing.
 

Laura Knotek

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Sounds like you may have installed a new program but did not select custom install. At which time the goog did its thing.
Adobe Flash updates used to be notorious for this. I believe it was the Ask Toolbar that Adobe would throw in unless users chose custom install.
 

mary beth hale

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Adobe Flash updates used to be notorious for this. I believe it was the Ask Toolbar that Adobe would throw in unless users chose custom install.

That damn Ask Toolbar...also kept getting sent to ask.com when browsing. Took me ages to clean that mess up. This was last year and I don't remember what I did to get things back to normal. Sorry. I Bing'd it and got instructions. Good luck to OP.
 
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tgp

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Adobe Flash updates used to be notorious for this. I believe it was the Ask Toolbar that Adobe would throw in unless users chose custom install.

Yes some Adobe products including Flash install Chrome by default, unless you unselect it. It is SOP for some free programs, including legit ones, to install another program by default. It is a form of revenue for them. Java installs the Ask.com toolbar and sets Ask as the default homepage unless you specifically unselect them.

I tell our customers to look carefully at every screen before clicking Next. Those addons can all be unselected, but of course you first need to see it!
 

longlifexs

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Hi,
thanks for the input!

I guess I understand how Chrome could have gotten installed (even though I'm 100 % sure I didn't confirm it - I didn't use my Surface for the past week and when using it yesterday, I definitely didn't install anything and even didn't go through an update process I could influence in any way).

What bothers me more though is the way IE behaved - how its shortcuts suddenly started opening Chrome, how after unisntalling Chrome, the IE shortcuts got broken, how the IE metro app now behaves...any ideas about that?

Thanks,

Mike
 

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