This page shows how to remove update-apps.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Does this sound familiar? You see update-apps.com in your browser’s status bar or in the network log while browsing on websites that generally don’t load any content from third party domains. Perhaps the update-apps.com domain show up when performing a search at the Google search engine?

Here’s a screenshot of update-apps.com when it showed up on my machine:

The following are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:

• Waiting for update-apps.com…
• Transferring data from update-apps.com…
• Looking up update-apps.com…
• Read update-apps.com
• Connected to update-apps.com…

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you apparently have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the update-apps.com domain appear in your browser. So don’t write angry emails to the site you were browsing, they are probably not responsible for the update-apps.com status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your computer is. I’ll try help you to remove the update-apps.com status bar messages in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but here we go: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and wilfully installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements, if any, that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional software on the machines. I first observed update-apps.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.

update-apps.com was created on 2013-02-28. errors.update-apps.com resolves to the 208.85.150.249 IP address and update-apps.com to 50.63.202.55.

So, how do you remove update-apps.com from your browser? On the machine where update-apps.com showed up in the status bar I had TornTV installed. I removed it with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from update-apps.com.

The issue with status bar messages such as this one is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.

To remove update-apps.com you need to review your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Examine what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons you installed in your browsers. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Did you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop update-apps.com? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!