This page shows how to remove comparinggenie.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Did you just see comparinggenie.com in the status bar of your browser and ask yourself where it came from? Or did comparinggenie.com show up while you searched for something on one of the major search engines, such as the Google search engine? Or did you see it on some other web site that should not load content from other web sites.
Here is a screenshot on comparinggenie.com from my machine:
This happened while visiting a web site that should not load any content from third party servers.
Here are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:
- Waiting for comparinggenie.com…
- Transferring data from comparinggenie.com…
- Looking up comparinggenie.com…
- Read comparinggenie.com
- Connected to comparinggenie.com…
If you also see this on your computer, you most likely have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the comparinggenie.com domain appear in your browser. Don’t write angry emails to the web site you were browsing, they are almost certainly not responsible for the comparinggenie.com status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your system is. I’ll do my best to help you remove the comparinggenie.com message in this blog post.
For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab systems and deliberately installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. I have 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional software on the computers. I first spotted comparinggenie.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab systems.
comparinggenie.com resolves to the 85.159.237.105 IP address. comparinggenie.com was created on 2015-04-15.
So, how do you remove comparinggenie.com from your browser? On the machine where comparinggenie.com showed up in the status bar I had istartsurf, Movie Wizard and MedPlayerNewVersion installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from comparinggenie.com.
The issue with status bar messages like this one is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program that’s installed on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.
So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove comparinggenie.com you need to examine your system for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:
The first thing I would do to remove comparinggenie.com is to examine the programs 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 listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started seeing the comparinggenie.com status bar messages.
The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?
I think most users will be able to find and uninstall the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually identify 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having problems figuring out if a file is legitimate or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Did this blog post help you to remove comparinggenie.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.
Thank you!