Third-party offers install on cancel

[wensveen]

Today I tried to install FileZilla. After agreeing to the GPL, I was offered a blank page with previous / next buttons. Milliseconds before clicking next a third-party offer appeared, to which I, by clicking next, had agreed to. I felt tricked, but realized this had probably more to do with loading times than with anything else. So I clicked cancel to abort the installation.

Apparently, just clicking 'next' was enough for the 3rd-party to set Bing as my homepage and who knows what else it did. I can't find anything else that doesn't belong on my PC, but I can't be sure.

Please, make the installer so that aborting the installation or clicking 'previous' to change your preference actually works and not install the 3rd-party offer (or any part thereof) anyway.

[botg]

This is unfortunate. It appears you have cancelled the installer only after the third-party offer has been installed.

Anyhow, the offer is benign, no lasting harm has been done. What has been offers is Lavasoft Webcompanion. It can be uninstalled from Windows' "Add or remove Programms" dialog (or similar named, depending on Windows version). The uninstaller will even set your homepage and search engine back to what it was before.

[kariot]

I got bitten by this too. Maybe the fact that I was using remote-desktop made this even harder to detect but I did see something flash up the instant before pressing next and I had no idea what it could have been. I pressed back and then pressed forward but couldn't see what had just been flashed before my eyes. So, me being paranoid, to be absolutely sure I couldn't possibly have missed anything canceled the installation altogether (before it had even started).

And guess what, I notice that something has pegged my CPU at 100% (WebCompanion...), at this point I just want to puke. I am VERY careful about no getting any crap on any of the machines I manage and this machine was across the Atlantic from me. I was quite hesitant at even installing filezilla but seeing as the .zip archive didn't work out of the box for some reason and I was getting desperate for a quick fix I tried the filezilla installer.

I guess I've misplaced my trust in filezilla.

And no. I do not trust that the uninstaller removed everything and this obviously is not something anyone at filezilla can know for sure either.

[DrLightman]

Just to let you know.

I found a mischievous software boundled with latest 3.22.2.2 that I just download and install right now.

I'm always very careful when hitting "Next" in installers because I got burned in the past (not only with FZ), but this time after a Next I saw something strange displaying in the wizard screen but it disappeared after 0.5 seconds, I pressed "Prev" button but nothing malicious was there and couldn't go Prev any further, so I hit Next again to complete the install.

As a result, Firefox was closed forcefully (yes, killed basically), a "WebCompanion" by LavaSoft software was been installed, Firefox star page changed, Firefox default search engine changed to Yahoo!, lot of blasphemies were heard at kilometers of distances (they were mines).

Fortunately there was an entry in Control Panel to uninstall this unwanted software, even if not all Firefox changes were reverted 100% as they were.

[botg]

All bundled software is meant to be easily and completely uninstallable, in case an offer has been accidentally accepted. Could you please let me know which Firefox setting was not reverted so that I can pass this information along?

[prjctfish]

Terrible I just installed on my Mac and FileZilla must have installed a lot of crap. Same thing as previous users, the third party options came up so quickly didn't see them. Now my Mac is running slowly, Adobe apps are stalling and crashing, why impose crap on users for open source software.

[botg]

That seems most unlikely. On Mac we're currently only having a search offer for your default search engine.