Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from userbrowsersurvey.com while browsing websites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from a Google search? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

If this description sounds like your story, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the userbrowsersurvey.com ads. Contacting the owner of the web site would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the advertisements. I’ll try help you with the userbrowsersurvey.com removal in this blog post.

If you have been visiting this blog already know this, but if you are new: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been observing the actions on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the systems. I first spotted the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

userbrowsersurvey.com resolves to the 5.9.123.45 address. userbrowsersurvey.com was created on 2015-12-03.

So, how do you remove the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the userbrowsersurvey.com ads I had Movie Wizard, MedPlayerNewVersion and istartsurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-up ads you need to review your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something suspicious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started observing the userbrowsersurvey.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to identify and remove the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having troubles figuring out if a file is legitimate or malware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the userbrowsersurvey.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!