How to fix the Avast Google Chrome “hijack” issue

While Avast has been rated as among the best if not the best antivirus apps available, a while back after setting it up I noticed that it “hijacked” the Google Chrome browser by overriding the startup preferences.

I always choose to load tabs from last time. Instead, whenever Chrome would start it would always go to www.yahoo.com/?fr=hp-avast&type=avastbcl Needless to say this upset me and a lot of people. Furthermore, there appeared no way to fix the issue. There was no extension installed to remove. Even HijackThis could not fix it.

Today I found the above forum and the info in it to deal with the issue, which is also provided in an Avast FAQ:

Search Provider:

Click the menu button (icon showing three horizontal lines) in the top right of your Google Chrome browser bar.

Then click ‘Settings’.

Under the ‘Search’ section, click the triangular arrow to expand the drop-down menu and select a new search provider.

Homepage:

Click the menu button (icon showing three horizontal lines) and select ‘Settings’.

Under the heading ‘On startup’ set the radio button to ‘Open a specific page or set of pages’.

Then click the link ‘Set pages’. Now type a new homepage into the field ‘Add a new page’ – e.g. ‘www.google.com’ – and click ‘OK’.

Even though I was initially upset, I still feel that Avast is an excellent product and their intentions are good. Perhaps with the Chrome “hijack” they were just being a little overly zealous. Even though I don’t use or install all the features of Avast in my experience over the years helping various users I think there are cases where each of them is useful.

For example, I don’t particularly need or want the browser cleanup feature. I already know exactly what addons are in my browser and I choose to enable/disable them very carefully. But then I’ve also seen people who don’t really understand and who visit all kinds of sites that offer to install browser addons. Then their browser is massively overloaded with all this stuff. For people like that this feature would be very useful.

I also run my own VPN so I don’t need the one they offer. I also don’t need the web shielf feature which filters web traffic. I don’t even use this feature which is available in web browsers. But there are cases where I would want this protection for people.

There are also new features like NG which helps with deep screening, and the new home network security feature which can check for things like infected systems on a home network and poorly configured home routers.

In general I like the things Avast does and the way it does them. I think its cool that it will run a scan and use a voice to tell me it is doing so while I continue to work.

As another example I like the software updater feature and think this is the direction that things need to go to help end-users maintain secure computers. A lot of things Avast does are things that a good system should do and it does them in the right ways.

Here are screenshots of my recent Avast installation and the options I selected during install: