For a while I was wondering why sites I visit regularly are getting buggy. When I visit Alexa, the traffic charts doesn’t render unless I refresh the page, sometimes a couple times. On Compete.com, it defaults to the “Site Profile” tab instead of “Compare Sites.” Clicking on the latter tab doesn’t do anything. On NBA and FoxSports, the dynamic slideshows doesn’t rotate, has formatting issues, and clicks don’t work. After logging into Contextweb, clicking on “Selling Desk” doesn’t work either. It’s seems to have trouble loading pages with javascript, jQuery, or Ajax. For all of the above, the problem is solved after a page refresh or two, so I tolerate it for a bit.
Today, I decided that I finally had enough. I googled for some answers and didn’t find any. I tested the same sites with Chrome and IE, and those browsers rendered those pages fine.
The most obvious solution then is to test the add-ons I’ve installed for Firefox, one by one. I installed about twenty, all of which are for production or web development. I disabled each addon and tested the browser with each of those troublesome pages.
The culprit was AVG Safe Search, which was installed automatically when you install AVG Anti-Virus. I was able to disable the add-on, and all of those troublesome pages rendered properly afterwards. Unfortunately, the option to uninstall it is grayed out. Thanks AVG - for creating a buggy addon that installs automatically and not letting your users uninstall it.
I did a quick search on Google and found instructions on manually removing AVG’s Safe Search with regedit.
AVG’s Safe Search analyzes each of your search results and alerts you if any of them are goes to malicious websites. Most tech-savvy users think it’s a completely useless tool that only slows down your browser … and screws up pages with javascript, jQuery, or Ajax.
REFERENCE:
Firefox 3: Can’t Uninstall AVG Safe Search Extension Because Uninstall is Grayed Out
