HECK NO!!

I very much doubt Oracle employees use Ask as their regular search engine...

But if you do, it is removable, so if you want to try it, you certainly can.

Thanks for your reply. I actually allowed the download and now want to undo it (it creates another couple of steps in the process of accessing a data stream that I use daily). How do I remove it??

You can disable or remove the Ask extension on the Add-ons page. Either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a
• orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Extensions. Then you may find 1, or more than 1, Ask-related items to disable.

Remove might also be available. If it isn't you'll have to remove them through the Windows Control Panel, Uninstall a Program.

Usually a link will appear above at least one disabled/removed extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.

Next, you may want to clear the Ask search engine plugin. On the Firefox search box, you can click the icon at the left to drop down the list and choose Manage Search Engines. Can you remove Ask here, and restore your preferred search engine to the default?

If Ask changed your home page or "new tab" page and you want to return to the defaults, you can run this extension to take care of that:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchreset/

If you wish to make manual changes, see these articles for the home page:

• Startup, home page, tabs, and download settings
• How to set the home page

And for the new tab page:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtab.url preference and enter your preferred page:

• Page thumbnails (default) => about:newtab
• Blank tab => about:blank
• Built-in Firefox home page => about:home
• Any other page => full URL to the page

Press Ctrl+t to open a new tab and verify that it worked. Fixed?

Note: if Ask is back after the next time you exit and start up Firefox again, you might have a user.js file in your personal Firefox settings folder (your Firefox profile folder). This article describes how to track down and remove the file: How to fix preferences that won't save. Probably worth checking right now while you're in cleanup mode.

Are you able to purge it completely?