Hello all,

Last night I downloaded Codec software -- against my better judgment -- in hopes of watching Alien Nation: Dark Horizon. The software performed poorly and was quickly uninstalled. I then noticed that my homepage (startpage) had gone AWOL, having been usurped by the Babylon search engine. I looked online at several remedies and was astounded at the complexity entailed in all of them!

To make a long story short, I chose the simple, effective solution of "System Restore," creating a restore point of 24 hours BC (before Codec). The demon was exorcised in about 3 minutes!

Cheers, JQP

Hello JQP,
Thanks for posting a workable solution to what is obviously a major problem affecting many Firefox users.

Your method may work, and obviously did for you, but it certainly should not IMHO be the method of choice. (I gave my personal preferred recommendations above)

However it is rather like taking the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut, and that sort of solution does have its own drawbacks for instance

1. it may not work !
   IIRC Windows restores have not; in the past; always correctly restored a working Firefox. So you could even break Firefox by attempting a System Restore.
2. users may not be sure which restore point to use,
   • and may not have full backups
   • there is a high risk of some sort of data loss, or loss of some other functionality.
     (Many users may not be sure exactly when the problem first occurred and what was added before or after the toolbar problem).
   • If out dated versions of softare are restored major Security problems could arise.
3. using and setting up "System Restore" is probably in itself a complex task for many users, and likely to need some advance preparation/action to be effective.

Cheers, John

Here's a foolproof way to get ride of Babylon:

1. in the search bar, type in about:config

2. click I'll be careful, I promise!

3. type in babylon in the search option

4. you'll see all the sh1t of babylon

5. right click on every option and click reset

6. your default search engine is now your default search engine

Finally fixed. In Vista - Remove or rename searchplugins/babylon.xml. (Program Files/...) I had two other files causing the problem - Found in Username/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/ ---- prefs.js and user.js -- user.js had only babylon entries which reset the prefs.js settings on starting firefox. Rename or delete or edit this file to remove babylon entries. Then you can edit prefs.js to permanently delete the babylon entries (backup and use text editor) or use about:config to blank them to default. If you rename prefs.js it will be like running firefox for the first time with all added extensions and complete default settings.

Thanks. Very helpful

I've tried most of the suggested solutions to no avail. What did work though is that I had a very recent backup of my system [with Acronis TrueImage 2010 to an external usb hard drive]. I retrieved the Firefox profile folder from the backup and replaced the one that is active in Firefox. I am using Windows 7 professional, and the folder is located in the folder c;\User\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\ and has the filename "Firefox". In order to see the folder AppData, you will need to tick the checkbox displayed in the window displayed when you type "show hidden files" in the Start search box. The babylon search box is activated by something in the profile folder and replacing the folder with a previously backed up one returns Firefox to its babylon-less one. It's a good idea to do a backup of this file [and your complete system, for that matter] on a regular basis.

thank you very much its gain and it make me very happy xox