My wife went through the update process on her free version, 2014.9.0.2018 about a week ago and told me it also downloaded Google Chrome. She strictly uses only Mozilla Firefox as her browser and Thunderbird as her e-mail application. I didn’t believe her when she said Chrome was installed because of Avast updating, but lo and behold, there it is, in information about the update that it installs mobile security for Chrome if she had an open Google account (which she does, to install apps from Google Play to her tablet). So I used Revo Uninstaller to uninstall Chrome. Now she has a problem with Thunderbird, in that it won’t allow her to click a link in an e-mail and have it open up the linked site in her Firefox browser. There isn’t even a way now to make Firefox the default browser in Control Panel. All this happened after she did the Avast update. What I’d like to know is will he computer still be protected the way it’s supposed to if I uninstall the current version of Avast she has and download and install the previous version? Or, more importantly, can I uninstall the current version and re-install it, while de-selecting the Google part of the install? Is that even possible? And if she uses an earlier version of Avast, can she let it do the virus definition updates without updating the program? Won’t that still keep her protected the most up-to-date way without having to use the newest version?
You should be able to set Firefox as default from within the firefox settings.
from within Firefox go to options then click advanced.
Then put a tick by always check if firefox is default on startup.
Then click OK
Close all instances of Firefox then when you start firefox again it should ask if you want to make firefox the default browser again.
Yes just use Firefox’s:-
Tool > Options > Advanced
to make sure Firefox is the default browser and:-
Tools > Options > General
to reset the homepage.
BTW if you’ve recently updated Firefox to the fairly horrible looking and ‘lets remove some useful features and give you other things you don’t want’ v.29 I recommend downloading the Classic Theme Restorer Add-On from Mozilla. You can, almost, getting it looking and behaving like v.28 again.
Sorry, can’t help with the Thunderbird issue.
can I uninstall the current version and re-install it, while de-selecting the Google part of the install? Is that even possible?
Yes. You must uninstall Google Chrome first. Then uninstall Avast. reboot, and reinstall Avast, but this time, uncheck the specific options to install Chrome (on first page) and be careful about selecting any Tools options on the second page (personally I deselect all). Once done, you should be good to go. There is also a utility named aswclear that is supposed to remove all remnants of Avast but since you are reinstalling it, I don’t perceive any need for it in your case. Good luck.
plsrepli
This is my wife’s big problem: When she clicks on a link in Thunderbird, the computer races its hard drive and the green bar where File–Edit–Tools and so on is located goes dim and then when it seems the computer is trying to link to a browser that is on her computer (Firefox) but apparentlly not linked to Thunderbird, she can’t click on anything on the screen—Start button, the links on the top of the e-mail page, etc.—nothing!–and have the links activate. Like now she clicks the start button. The start menu pops up for like half a second and then goes away. This is after she tries to click a link within a Thunderbird e-mail and hoping the link would open up Firefox. We just did the re-setting the default on startup browser by going into Options and then Advanced in Firefox. This does nothing! Last night, I rebooted in safe mode and selected Java from control panel and enabled Java when using Firefox as the browser. This kept the hard drive from speedily running all the time, but not much else. This is consuming way too much time trying to fix this problem then I have. Please help if you can.